Educating the Reader

BOOK BIZ 101: EDUCATING THE READER

Readers are passionate about their books, and some, bless them, are ravenous in their reading.

Unfortunately, many don’t understand enough about the business of publishing so they end up hurting the authors and the publishers which means fewer favorite authors and publishers.  

It’s up to authors to educate them for both their sakes.  Here are some suggestions.

First and foremost, readers, publishers, and authors are an ecosystem, and money is the food that keeps that ecosystem alive.  

If you financially starve any part of the system, the whole system can fail.

These days, with the advent of self-publishing, some authors are their publishers, but the ecosystem is primarily the same.  

WAYS TO HELP AUTHORS:

•If you can't find a book, ask the bookstore to special order it for you.  If enough people do this, they'll order the author's next book.  This also helps the bookstores stay in business.

•Pre-ordering a book before the publication date tells the publisher and the bookseller that this book will be popular, and they may buy/print more copies. Many authors consider this tip the number one way for readers to help an author’s career.

•Don’t pass around new books to friends.  A bookstore and the publisher can only tell how popular a book is by the number of copies sold.  If you share your one book with six friends, the publisher and the bookstore won't know this.  Get those six friends to buy the book themselves.  The only exception to this rule is the first book of a series after a few books have been published.  If you get friends addicted to a series you love so they will buy the rest of the series, you will help keep that series alive.  

•Buy the book new, not used.  If you buy the book used, you won't be counted as a reader by the publisher who only knows about new book sales.  Neither the publisher nor the author gets paid when a used book is sold so money is being syphoned away from the producers of books. 

•E-books cannot be sold used because of copyright laws.  Nor can they be borrowed except from a library or a closed system like Kindle.  Authors/publishers have to agree that their book can be loaned.  

•Don't take a paper book to the used bookstore until it is no longer on the bookstore shelves.  Two to three months from the time you buy it is a good rule of thumb.  

•Paperback books without their covers are stolen books.   Tell the person at the flea market or used bookstore that it's illegal to sell and show them the legal note to this effect at the front of the book.  If you continue to see books like this sold, send a letter to the publisher or use their website to tell them.

•If you see an electronic version of a copyrighted novel available for free at some website or on a newsgroup, contact the publisher or author immediately and tell them.  Not only is this illegal, but it is the financial murder of your favorite authors and the end of the kind of books you love.  

•Even if you are financially forced to buy used or to borrow books from the library or friends, you can still help the author.  Write reviews.  Tell friends.  Reviews and word of mouth sell books.  

NOTE:  If you have other ideas, please share them in the comments.  

Part Five

The Current State of Publishing and Bookselling, Part 5

WHAT DOES ALL THIS MEAN?

For authors, in the short term, all the news is bad unless you are already a "name" author. Midlist paper books are disappearing in bookstores and box stores.

According to my writing friends, a novel at Walmart accounted for almost thirty percent of all their books sold. Now, their books aren't available there. Their publishers are also losing out on those extra sales.

With bookstores also taking fewer titles in a publisher's line each month, some titles are available nowhere but a few independent booksellers and online.

If already established bestselling authors are the only ones sold at the major venues, where and how can an author build an audience big enough to join this exclusive club?

With most of the time and expense of promotion falling on the author's shoulders, how will the author manage financially? How will the author be able to produce the number of books needed yearly to grow their audience?

For publishers, if they can't find many places to sell that month's entire line of books, what can they do?

Do they drop most of their authors and only print "names?"

Where do they grow their talent to add to that list of names?

Do they start a farm system similar to major league baseball where new authors rise up through the ranks via ebooks?

Do they only recruit authors already building a name with small publishers?

I imagine we'll see a number of different "solutions" to these questions as authors and publishers try to survive this new hostile environment to selling books.

WHITHER READERS?

Any solution to this problem depends on what the readers will do.

Will readers be willing to only buy the name authors they see at Walmart and other places where they usually shop, or will they start depending on physical bookstores?

Will they be willing to buy online?

If they can't get paper books, will they move to ebooks?

If history is any indication, a majority will stop buying paper books. When science fiction disappeared from those dimestore racks years ago, the market plummeted, and the market has been rebuilding ever since.

On the other hand, when readers discovered erotica which was almost exclusively available as ebooks, the market expanded to the point that publishers like Ellora's Cave became multimillion dollar companies, and authors made money envied by their paper-published contemporaries.

Readers of erotica and romance are voracious readers, though, and smaller markets like science fiction haven't had the same online success even proportional to the number of readers of paper books.

Those of us who love to read and write can hope others will follow us online and into digital format, and I imagine some will, but will the numbers be enough to support the publishers and the authors?

No one can guess.

~*~

In Part Six of this series, I'll discuss the role of epublishing in publishing.

The Current State of Publishing and Bookselling, Part 1

Today, I'm starting a short series of blogs on the state of publishing and bookselling and how that affects writers and readers. I'm focusing on genre novels.

Sources for the information I'm using include "Publishers Weekly," "Shelf Awareness," "Publisher's Lunch," and various professional trade blogs.

My credentials: I'm a publishing news junkie of over thirty years, and a published author of over ten years.

First, an overview of what's happening in the business.

THE ECONOMY

Not surprisingly, the problems with the economy are hurting the sale of books. If it's a choice between food and gas or books, books are almost always the loser.

Even romance, which has always been considered an economy-proof genre, has struggled recently although it remains healthy with steady growth.

Readers are borrowing books at the library and buying used books. Neither venue is good for the author bottom line.

If a reader has a choice between a "name" favorite author and another author for a new book purchase, she will buy the name author. New authors' books tend to be bought used.

THE BOOKSTORES, CHAINS, AND BIG BOX STORES

The current trends in bookstores and other physical locations is more books by just a few authors.

Target and Walmart which sell large numbers of books have cut down the amount of books by around fifty percent in the last few years. The books added to the shelves each month are almost always that month's list leader -- the publisher's lead title for that month, and it's usually a name author.

They believe they make money by having more space taken up by more books by a few bestsellers than with a wider range of authors and books.

Meanwhile, the chains like Barnes & Noble and Borders are putting out more authors and titles, but they, too, no longer carry most of that month's books by the major publishers.

Borders has started a series of concept stores which display books cover forward. So far, they've seen an increase in sales although they have cut the number of titles displayed by thirty percent.

Independent stores are dying at an alarming rate, and those which remain often keep themselves afloat by selling used books.

Still, a vast majority of all books sold are in brick and mortar stores.

In the next days, I'll cover online markets, print on demand, ebooks, and the problems with Amazon, then I'll discuss options for authors as well as the near and far future as publishing changes.