Samhain Publishing is winding down and will close

[Pajamaman]

http://authorearnings.com/report/october-2016/

This report is clear. Total indie ebook sales have dropped since may 2016. Consumption has fallen. So why? I wonder if there is a corresponding drop in disposal incomes.

[GeoffR]

Originally Posted by Pajamaman

http://authorearnings.com/report/october-2016/

This report is clear. Total indie ebook sales have dropped since may 2016. Consumption has fallen. So why? I wonder if there is a corresponding drop in disposal incomes.

Most ebook reports seem to focus only on the US market, so they interpret a drop in US sales as a drop in total consumption when it might only be a shift away from US publishers or retailers.

Other reports on internet spending have shown a big shift away from US products and retailers in favour of UK ones since the pound crash last year, so maybe something similar happened for ebooks.

Although georestrictions and retailer walled gardens make it more difficult simply to choose to buy from the UK instead of the US, there is still an effect on the competitiveness of books priced in US dollars which have to compete with books by UK publishers priced in pounds, as the UK publishers now have more margin to play with.

From what I see most self-publishers and small US publishers seem to price in US dollars and rely on the retailer or aggregator to convert to other currencies. Big publishers take a different approach and price for each market. The difference in approaches was clear to me when New Zealand added 15% GST to ebooks last year: while most of the big publishers absorbed the extra cost and maintained their price points, the price of self-published ebooks increased 15% overnight.

Before the pound crashed last year, a book by a UK publisher priced at £4.99 would be roughly equivalent to $7.99 in US dollars, but now it is closer to $5.99. So anyone pricing their books in US dollars has either had to drop their prices significantly or lose competitiveness to UK publishers.

[Pajamaman]

Brexit was on june 23 and the pound was high until that date. The report notes a drop in ebook indie sales from may. So I'm doubt the drop in sterling explains it. Can US buyers even buy UK ebooks from Amazon?

[GeoffR]

Originally Posted by Pajamaman

Brexit was on june 23 and the pound was high until that date. The report notes a drop in ebook indie sales from may. So I'm doubt the drop in sterling explains it. Can US buyers even buy UK ebooks from Amazon?

The pound started dropping steadily from the end of 2015, but the big crash was mid-2016.

If you are in the US or UK you might not notice, but in other countries you often have a choice between US or UK editions of the same book. When the pound drops against the US dollar then either the relative prices of the editions changes, or in the case of publishers who maintain fixed price points one publisher has more margin available than the other to spend on promotion and specials. Self-published books have to compete against whichever edition is cheaper, so if they price only against the US edition then they lose competitiveness when the UK edition drops in price or the UK publisher starts having more specials.

Edit: Of course self-published ebooks are also competing against paper books, and when the pound drops then UK paperbacks become cheaper. Again, those in the US or UK probably don't notice, because those in the UK are earning income in pounds, and those in the US mainly buy from US retailers. But in other countries people are used to buying from foreign sites and it is no big deal to switch from a US site to a UK site if the prices change.

(To give an example that is entirely within Amazon without using any VPN tricks, I can buy ebooks from amazon.com or amazon.com.au, but I can buy paper books from amazon.com or amazon.co.uk, so if price was the main factor for me I might decide to switch from buying US-published ebooks from amazon.com and buy UK-published paper books from amazon.co.uk instead.)

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by Pajamaman

Brexit was on june 23 and the pound was high until that date. The report notes a drop in ebook indie sales from may. So I'm doubt the drop in sterling explains it. Can US buyers even buy UK ebooks from Amazon?

Anyone can publish on Amazon. The .wherever doesn't matter. I think with a work around I could buy from the UK.

Now why such the big concern?
Books like businesses open and close all the time. Indie sales may be down for the reasons given in this thread. Unlike 2011, people are not as apt to buy from new, unknown authors. They expect quality in their books.
As a reader, I should not be able to tell the publisher from reading the book. So it is to the indie detriment that readers do now look.

[GeoffR]

Deleted, was supposed to be an edit of my previous post.

[Blossom]

Originally Posted by Cinisajoy

Now why such the big concern?
Books like businesses open and close all the time. Indie sales may be down for the reasons given in this thread. Unlike 2011, people are not as apt to buy from new, unknown authors. They expect quality in their books.
As a reader, I should not be able to tell the publisher from reading the book. So it is to the indie detriment that readers do now look.

This thread was about why "Samhain" is closing not why indie books are down or not selling. The romance market has changed that is why Samhain is closing. Samhain lost the motivation to promote and compete with the market as they did in times past.

They have some good writers Rose Lerner, Lynn Connolly are really good. They have several mainstream backlists titles but they lost motivation in promoting. I see that now. They use to have sales, coupons, special promotions but they seldom even have sales anymore and when they do it's only on their site and not other retailers.

They allow themselves to be buried. They may have found more funding but they did nothing to change their market strategy. So here they are closing very soon.

This is the bottom line. It's not Amazon fault or readers. It's the slush pile flooded out good books and the economy making readers more smart in their buying.

Open Road did something unheard of they did a huge freebie promotion in December. They also started their own bookbub email service. Daily deals. They are trying survive.

Sent from my Nexus 7

[pwalker8]

In general, companies stay in business by understanding and satisfying their customers needs and wants. While there are certainly market swings in the book world and all businesses require a certain level of business acumen, it's the companies that lost touch with their customers who tend to get swallowed by a shift in the market rather than the companies who keep in touch with their customers.

[Pajamaman]

Originally Posted by Cinisajoy

Anyone can publish on Amazon. The .wherever doesn't matter. I think with a work around I could buy from the UK.

What kind of workaround is necessary for US buyers to buy books from amazon.co.uk? I assumed there would be geo-restrictions. Is the workaround simple?

[Pajamaman]

https://reprog.wordpress.com/2010/11...ork-in-the-uk/

From a brief search, it seems working round UK/US restrictions is not trivial. Also it appears to be impracticle to repeatedly switch between the two. In addition, the workarounds seem to awkward for most users. As such, it seems unlikely that the currency shift can explain the authorearnings downshift in US ebook earnings. I believe their data to be valid. Indie ebook sales in the US began to drop in May 2016. Why?

[AnemicOak]

Originally Posted by Pajamaman

What kind of workaround is necessary for US buyers to buy books from amazon.co.uk? I assumed there would be geo-restrictions. Is the workaround simple?

Some users have had success setting up a separate Amazon UK account, but I know when I tried it years ago (following instructions from folks here who have been successful) I got an email basically saying we know you're not in the UK and if we're wrong here's what you need to do to prove it.

Much easier to buy geo-restricted books from Kobo.

[AnemicOak]

Originally Posted by Pajamaman

http://authorearnings.com/report/october-2016/

This report is clear. Total indie ebook sales have dropped since may 2016. Consumption has fallen. So why? I wonder if there is a corresponding drop in disposal incomes.

I don't know how AE gets there data, but some thoughts...

1) Couldn't it be something as simple as a simple dilution of overall available titles causing it to be harder to accurately measure the market? If you had X number of indies and now there are 25, 50, 100% more which is possibly causing it to be harder to read the market. If author A's sales dropped by 1,000 books in that quarter did those sales simply get split by authors B, C, D, E, F & G who collectively make up that number, but individually don't get measured since they're almost completely off the radar?

2) Big 5 pubs are getting more aggressive with their reduced price sale titles and catching some of the same market, price point wise.

3) Smaller/Medium pubs like Sourcebooks & Open Road are also having more sales (including lots of free & $.99 titles) and may be capturing some of the indies market.

4) Kindle Unlimited (& to a smaller extent Scribd). Why buy all of theses indie books when I can get tons of them in an All You Can Eat setting by paying a small monthly free when compared to buying them?

5) More crap being put out means more for folks to wade through which may send some of them back to more trad pubs where they feel there is a better shot to get something that's at least had an editing pass or two.

6) Indie & Trad pub pricing has gotten closer. Indie books that were $2.99-$3.99 are now often $4.99-$5.99. A lot of trad pub mass market stuff is in the $5.99-$7.99 range, but some pubs have been going as low as $1.99 each for every title in some series through their digital first imprints and even as low as $4.99 for a regular price on the eBook version of more traditionally published titles that get both a print and digital release. The digital first imprints especially are positioned to be in a similar market space to indies.


Personally I've also noticed a lot of indies I personally buy have had the author slow down on how quickly titles are released. Some were putting out half a dozen, or more, books are year and have cut way back finding that workload unsustainable in the long term if they want to keep the quality up.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by AnemicOak

Personally I've also noticed a lot of indies I personally buy have had the author slow down on how quickly titles are released. Some were putting out half a dozen, or more, books are year and have cut way back finding that workload unsustainable in the long term if they want to keep the quality up.

Where's Walter Gibson when you need him?

[Pajamaman]

Originally Posted by AnemicOak

I don't know how AE gets there data, but some thoughts...

They go into some depth as to how they collect data in the report. Basically they have taken a snapshots of daily sales and the best-seller list on Amazon.com then drew an average from the data. They have also filtered out authors who make less than $10000 a year, which leaves about 5% of authors. So they are looking at sales of authors who are selling consistently, and filtering flashes in the data that do not reappear.

[Pajamaman]

Originally Posted by GeoffR

The pound started dropping steadily from the end of 2015, but the big crash was mid-2016.

The "crash" happened at the end of May, and was a drop of about 10 cents in the pound. I am skeptical that that is enough for most buyers to attempt to circumvent geo-restrictions, which is difficult to do and almost certainly against Amazon's rules. I don't think it explains the authorearnings drop in indie ebook sales.

Something else maybe?