Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Category: Books

Stuff I’ve read or helped to write

  • How much do books actually cost to produce?

    There’s an interesting post on The Guardian books blog today: The true price of publishing.

    Most people instinctively feel that ebooks should be substantially cheaper than paper books, because an ebook is not physically “made”: there are no printing costs. But if, says Levine, the real value of a book resides in the “text itself”, then the delivery method shouldn’t much matter. The fixed costs – acquiring, editing, marketing – remain unchanged.

    That’s a tough argument to get across, I think, because Amazon in particular has been very aggressive with ebook pricing. Because ebooks are cheap, Joe and Jane Public expect future ebooks to be cheap too. They neither know nor care that VAT wipes out most of the production cost difference (VAT is levied on ebooks but not printed ones).

    Aggressive pricing isn’t new, of course. Amazon has been doing it with print for ages – when did you last pay the RRP for *anything* on Amazon? – and supermarkets often use books as loss-leaders. In most cases the winners aren’t the publishers or the authors; they’re Amazon, and the supermarkets. You don’t really have a business without them, but their demands for discounts mean that it’s not much of a business with them.

    This is something I want to come back to when I have a bit of time to do the subject justice: I think the aggressive pricing of ebooks by name authors with backlists to shift, and the rush to undercut their prices by almost every new ebook author out there, could be a form of collective career suicide. Once something’s devalued, it’s hard to change people’s perspectives of what constitutes fair pricing. Just ask the developers getting slagged on iTunes for daring to charge more than 79p for their apps.

    According to The Times, most books don’t sell:

    Last month [in 2008] Nielsen Bookscan, which tracks book sales nationwide, showing that, of 200,000 books on sale last year, 190,000 titles sold fewer than 3,500 copies. More devastating still, of 85,933 new books, as many as 58,325 sold an average of just 18 copies. And things aren’t much better over the pond: I read recently that, of the 1.2million titles sold in the United States in 2004, only 2 per cent sold more than 5,000 copies.

    If the public comes to expect professional cover design, production and editing at amateur-hour prices, I suspect there’s going to be precious little profit for the overwhelming majority of ebook authors. Even if you do 3,500 copies, if you’re doing them on the Kindle store at 99p a pop then your entire take is £1,050 before tax.

    Most writers will be lucky to do one tenth of those sales: in 2007, the Guardian reported that “the average sale of a hardback book by a first-time writer is 400 copies”. That’s £120 in Kindle money. If you’re doing things the DIY way and paying for a cover designer and an editor, you’re going to make a significant loss.

    I’m not arguing that nobody can make money from ebooks. Of course they can. Some are shifting tens of thousands of books, and making tidy sums out of it. But it’s important to remember that they’re the exceptions.

    I’ll come back to this soon, I’m sure.

  • A very short review of Let’s Get Digital by David Gaughran

    I feel a little bit bad about the slagging I gave John Locke’s how-to manual, so I thought I’d redress the balance a little bit by mentioning Let’s Get Digital. If you’re looking for a manual on e-publishing, spend your money on Gaughran’s book, not Locke’s: Gaughran makes it abundantly clear that the work starts when you finish the book, and the book is stuffed with useful links and practical advice. Some of the case studies are interesting too.

    If you’re too skint or too tight to pay the £1.71 Gaughran is asking on Amazon, he’s giving a PDF version away for free. Which is awfully nice of him.

  • It was a dark and stormy night

    This year’s Bulwer-Lytton contest winners have been announced. This one is my favourite:

    As the dark and mysterious stranger approached, Angela bit her lip anxiously, hoping with every nerve, cell, and fiber of her being that this would be the one man who would understand—who would take her away from all this—and who would not just squeeze her boob and make a loud honking noise, as all the others had.

  • A (Glasgow) fair price

    If you haven’t been tempted by my novel Coffin Dodgers so far, allow me to introduce my Super Awesome Holiday Promotion: to celebrate Glasgow Fair, when everybody in Glasgow traditionally takes a fortnight off work and goes to Rothesay, I’m slashing – slashing! – the price of Coffin Dodgers for a wee bit. It’s short, sharp and just the thing to read on the Rothesay ferry as the smell of chips wafts across the sea. Links are on the cunningly titled Coffin Dodgers page, which is linked at the top of this page.

  • Ray Banks on ebook piracy

    This is interesting. Ray Banks – who is good – talks about ebooks with Allan Guthrie – who is also good – and the conversation turns to book piracy. Banks:

    Authors should be pleased they’re being pirated. I know I was. Over the last twenty years or so, branding has shifted from publisher to author, so when someone illegally downloads and enjoys your book, they’re going to remember you, not your publisher. Plus, it means there’s a demand for your books not currently being met. As for publishers, especially those spending bucketloads of money to play Canute, why can’t they harness the potential of the torrent to their own ends? After all, these are people who like to read so much, they’re willing to go to that extra length to get free copies. That’s word of mouth right there, and I’d much rather see a thousand copies of my book go for free to people who wanted it than see another ARC show up on eBay. Also, P2P networks still represent a no-maintenance, utterly free and worldwide channel of distribution. Most companies would kill for that kind of reach with that little overhead.

    I’d just add two things to that. One, many of the ebook pirates I’ve seen are collectors – not in the sense of collecting something and valuing it, but in the sense of wanting to have something just for the sake of having it. It’s the volume that matters, not the content, so for example you’ll see torrents promising X hundred Kindle books and those books have *absolutely nothing in common with one another*. It’s very unlikely that you’ll like Ray Banks and bodice rippers (it’s possible, but unlikely), so I’m not sure that there’s any benefit to authors from that particular kind of piracy.

    The other point I’d add is that many apparently pirated books are no such thing: many pirate sites are frauds, listing books they don’t have in the hope you’ll pay for membership.

    For what it’s worth I’m not hugely bothered by the idea of piracy, unless somebody’s making money from it. I’ve specified DRM-no and Lending-yes options for my own stuff.

  • Coffin Dodgers review

    Tracy from Booked Up says some nice things about my book.

    This book was a really quick, fun read. I romped through it, amused by the antics of the threesome and curious to find out what was going on and whether justice would be served. It’s set in a world that’s not too hard to envisage and the three main characters are the sort of people I could happily sit and chat in the pub with.

  • You can’t autograph an ebook

    I’ve bought an awful lot of books over the years, but there’s only one I’m really attached to: Blood’s a Rover by James Ellroy. It’s not my favourite book – it’s not even my favourite Ellroy book – but it stands out from all the others because Ellroy signed it for me.

    Last night, I got another keeper: Killer Move, the new thriller by Michael Marshall, aka Michael Marshall Smith.

    There’s something about getting an autograph that’s really powerful, I think. It’s not the signature itself – I’ve no interest in the impersonal “signed by the author” piles in bookshops, and I wouldn’t think of buying a signed book on eBay – but the whole ritual of the signing, whether it’s an ego-fest like Ellroy’s or something more inclusive and thoughtful like Marshall’s event last night.

    For me at least, getting a book signed is a weird way of saying thanks, of letting an author know that they’ve had an effect or influence on you in some way, that their work isn’t just something that’s picked up and read and then forgotten about. Whether authors see it that way I have no idea, of course. It may just annoy them.

    I’m a fairly recent convert to book signings, but I suspect that for all the ebook hype they’ll continue to be an important thing for writers – or at least, those writers whose publishers still put out hardcovers. Ebooks are great, and cheap, and convenient, but a signed hardback is magical.

  • “Mayhem and gags”

    Things that make me happy: Doug Johnstone reviewed Coffin Dodgers in the new issue of The Big Issue Scotland, which is on sale today. The good Mr Johnstone wrote this:

    Marshall is a journalist turned novelist who has clearly been reading plenty of Chris Brookmyre and Colin Bateman, as his debut fictional outing shares with those authors a no-holds-barred thriller plot with a sense of the ridiculous, lacing nastiness with some delightfully black comedy… Told with a sureness of hand, it’s not exactly high art but Marshall does still manage some astute social commentary amongst the mayhem and gags.

  • Weird things customers say in bookshops

    This cracked me up. By Jen Campbell, via MetaFilter:

    Customer: Hi, if I buy a book, read it, and bring it back, could I exchange it for another book?
    Me: No… because then we wouldn’t make any money.
    Customer: Oh.

  • Review: How I sold 1 million ebooks in 5 months, by John Locke

    It’s a safe bet that any book flogging a “marketing system” will contain a few nuggets of hard information surrounded by thousands of words of padding. John Locke’s how-to is no exception. It sticks closely to the business self-help template, which goes something like this:

    Page 1
    In this book, you’ll discover the secrets of X that made me a millionaire! You don’t need any special powers, or any money, or any talent! No! All you need is the secrets that I’ll reveal in this very book! Yes sirree, once you’ve finished this book you’ll know the marketing system that made me so much money!

    Page 37
    We’re nearly ready to discover the secrets of X that will make you a millionaire! When you discover how simple my system is, you’ll slap your own head! “Man!” you’ll say. “I wish I’d had this book ten years ago!” Once you’re armed with the knowledge I’m offering in this book – knowledge that I’d pay $10,000 for, but I’m giving you for $4.99 ebook or $9.99 paperback! – you’ll be able to do what I did!

    Page 432
    We’re just one step away from discovering the secrets of X, secrets so useful I’d happily pay $10,000 for them if I didn’t already know them! And you’re getting them for just $4.99 ebook or $9.99 paperback! Don’t skip forwards, though, because the steps only work if you know the context! And when you do, man! You’ll be blown away! So let’s talk about my first pet, Spot the dog. Man, I loved that dog!

    Page 999
    Work out what lots of people want to buy. Make it, price it cheap, tweak the formula to make the most people happy and work really hard on direct marketing.

    I’m being unfair, but only slightly. The book is a pamphlet padded out to book length, and most of the advice is Marketing 101. Locke does bring a few of his own ideas to the table, and they clearly worked for him (I’m not going to tell you the details, because that would be a cheap shot) but I’d personally be extremely uncomfortable following some of them. There was something about the process of blogging and promoting the blog posts that made me uneasy.

    Most of it is classic “pile ’em high, sell ’em cheap” stuff: Locke compares his own work to McDonalds, and points out that William Shakespeare may be a better writer but Locke’s sold more ebooks on Amazon.

    It is not, you’ll be amazed to discover, very well written. There are very many exclamation marks.

    What Locke excels at isn’t writing. His skill is in working out exactly what his audience wants. That’s why his novels sell, and this book’s just as precision-targeted. Vanity publishing is a conspiracy perpetrated by the publishing industry, he argues, and books can’t be bad if the author’s spent so much time and effort on them. While that plays well to Locke’s buyers, a quick trawl through a day’s Smashwords uploads demonstrates that there are plenty of bad books out there.

    Locke is absolutely right that some worthwhile books don’t get picked up by traditional publishing, but that doesn’t mean that every rejected book is worthwhile.

    This isn’t a publishing-only phenomenon, of course. You see the same thing in music: one visit to a Tuesday night Battle of the Bands is enough to prove that most musicians aren’t geniuses cruelly snubbed by an uncaring music business.

    What Locke’s system reminds me of most is search engine optimisation, which all too often leads to articles like this:

    How I sold 1 million ebooks in 5 months by John Locke review. In this How I sold 1 million ebooks in 5 months by John Locke review I’ll review How I sold 1 million ebooks in 5 months by John Locke. John Locke’s book, How I sold 1 million ebooks in 5 months, is a new book from the author of [title here], [title here], [title here], but with How I sold 1 million ebooks in 5 months John Locke is going after a different audience.

    It works, to a point, but it’s hellish to read. Locke’s system isn’t dramatically different (Incidentally I’m aware of the irony that by slagging SEO, I’m committing acts of SEO): he’s a human algorithm, tweaking the content of his books to maximise his readership and his income. It’s worked spectacularly well for him, but as with SEO, the more people who use the same tricks, the less effective those tricks will be.

    I don’t have an axe to grind here. Locke is clearly a smart man, and his success is well deserved. This book, like everything else he’s written, is going to sell by the shedload. I’m just not sure the same will apply to the books of Locke’s disciples.