I’m going, going, going…The blog posts might get a little scarce.  But I’ll write my progress here.  The deal is I need to ratchet up the relationships for you diehard relationship readers who spend so much lovely money.  I wrote a mystery.  Need a romantic suspense.  This will take some doing, but I’m game.  It’s kinda of a fun challenge.  I love romance threads anyway. 

I like Paul Krugman ’cause he’s smart and often I agree with him.   He has an interesting column of publishing.  He predicts creative works, once digitalized, will no longer have a profit margin.  The money will have to be made in other ways such as the Grateful Dead, who give free downloads of their music, but make money through their concerts and branded goods sold such as T-shirts. 

How will this affect the publishing business? Right now, publishers make as much from a Kindle download as they do from the sale of a physical book. But the experience of the music industry suggests that this won’t last: once digital downloads of books become standard, it will be hard for publishers to keep charging traditional prices.

Indeed, if e-books become the norm, the publishing industry as we know it may wither away. Books may end up serving mainly as promotional material for authors’ other activities, such as live readings with paid admission. Well, if it was good enough for Charles Dickens, I guess it’s good enough for me.

Now, the strategy of giving intellectual property away so that people will buy your paraphernalia won’t work equally well for everything. To take the obvious, painful example: news organizations, very much including this one, have spent years trying to turn large online readership into an adequately paying proposition, with limited success.

But they’ll have to find a way. Bit by bit, everything that can be digitized will be digitized, making intellectual property ever easier to copy and ever harder to sell for more than a nominal price. And we’ll have to find business and economic models that take this reality into account.

The alarm about free e-book copies being distributed is spreading.  I think it’s true that downloadable books will easily lead to piracy and file sharing, a la the music industry.  But authors can only make money from ancillary services other than book writing?  This is concerning because it means only the few authors who are virtual rock stars will make money, if then.  Who wants to buy an author T-shirt or pay to go to a reading?  I don’t know if even Stephen King has that sort of chops. 

This dude over at Harvard Business Publishing has come up with a solution. 

Here’s how: publishers should view authors as savvy early-stage investors view emerging businesses – they track the ones they like, possibly offering some guidance for how to test the market. Then, only when they perceive the possibility of success, they invest money to accelerate growth.

For publishing, it would work something like this::

• Authors self-package their book entirely on their own.
• Authors distribute digital copies of their books for free to attract readers and to identify a market. They use self-distribution tools to sell as many books as they can.
• Based on the response, the publisher determines which books to pick up, and pays a licensing and distribution right and uses their relationships to distribute a product that has developed an initial marketplace of buyers (note: great new potential business model for some plucky entrepreneur: track the ‘response’ of free book downloads as a data set for publishers to review opportunities).
• Publishers take the completed product, make tweaks as author and publisher feel necessary, print more and distribute them through the strength of their partners.

Here, everyone wins. Authors have to prove their ability to deliver a good book and build an audience before a publisher fully invested. Publishers greatly reduce the up front production costs and the risk of betting on authors that can’t produce, and increase the odds that what they spend on will provide results.

What?  Authors self package the book entirely on their own?  No advance?  We take the risk?  It looks like self-publishing, sounds like self-publishing…damn, it must be self-publishing. 

This is what a lot of black authors did in the nineties before NY publishers discovered that inner city black folks read and spend money on books.  It was a big newsflash to whites in publishing we read the amount we do.  Even Terry McMillan self-published at first.  These authors didn’t give away their books, they sold by hand.  Once NYC savvied their success, the big publishers picked them up.  Now there’s a handful of once self-published authors making decent money and dancing to big business’s tune.  Since the six-seven figure contracts were readily accepted, these once self-published authors must have thought NYC taking the risk was worth it. 

So the dude’s idea has been done.  The results were…few authors picked up and making money, with a loss of autonomy.   Publishers realized that we read, but decided we only want to read soap opera, street drug, thug and shoot ‘em ups, and baby mama drama!  Sheesh.   It is now hard to find black SFF, mystery, paranormal and other sort of fiction.   We are still segregated by race in commercial book publishing. Publishers control the market and they still have set ideas about how all blacks are.    If we went back to the self-publishing mode, other sort of books might have more of a chance, but self-publishing has many pitfalls. 

But white folks have a tremendous stigma against self publishing.  But my problem with it, is without an editor and the check and balance system, a lot of effort will be spent on crap.  I don’t get how the entrepreneur model  will work, but maybe it’s because it’s morning and I don’t have my coffee yet. 

The e-book model where no advance is given, but the author is paid frequently (monthy) on a percentage of true tallies of product sold seems good enough to me.  Publishing transparency would go a long way and I think authors would be willing to share the risk a bit more with this tranparency and larger royalties. 

As far as authors selling ancillary services instead of books,, the demands of promotion are bad enough.  Expecting authors to do more than write books (perform, etc.) seems a bit much.  But dude has put his money where his mouth is. 

• I wrote and produced the book entirely on my own. With some help from my good friend, John Butman, I hired a book packager in NY who helped ‘produce’ the book to our vision (just like they would for the major publishers)
• We set up our own Amazon page where we’re selling the real thing.
• Then the big kicker: as of Monday, June 16th, the entire book is available in PDF form for free from 20 ‘Big Thinking’ bloggers like Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki, Tom Peters, and including HarvardBusiness.org’s own Bill Taylor.

I’ll watch and see how this goes.   The comments on the post are interesting.

Paul Krugman: Bits, Bands and Books

How the book industry should reinvent itself

I love paranormal…I went on a paranormal buy spree not from the library!), including one book for the kid.

• Midnight (Warriors: The New Prophecy, Book 1) - Erin Hunter
  
  
• The free download from SMP of Sherrilyn Kenyon’s Asheron.  You can get it here:  http://www.yearofacheron.com/ebook.html
   
• Joely’s Burkhart’s The Rose of Shanhasson
   
• Allison Brennan’s Killing Fear.  (I can’t find it!  Where is it?) not a paranormal–suspense
   
• Iron Kissed (Mercy Thompson, Book 3) - Patricia Briggs, yep, I read the first two
  
  
• Grimspace - Ann Aguirre
  
  
• Personal Demons - Stacia Kane
  
  

I’m a bit backlogged in my reading, writing, everything, but I’m a happy girl. I have another paranormal book spree I want to do when I get a chance…several of Meljeans, including the anthologies, Shiloh Walker, add that damn JR Ward one (check library), need to catch up on Lynn Viehl too.  Holly’s Ruby Key for me and the kid. 

Bloggers do affect my choices since there are so many books to pick from.  You feel you know them a bit.  Why are there so few blacks writing paranormal and urban fantasy?  I already have LA Banks.  Oh yeah, the publishers don’t think Negroes like that sort of thing and mostly keep us to soap opera stuff, which I’m not that keen about.  I don’t read by race, but it’s funny how I feel guilty if there is not a good percentage of black authors in the books I purchase.  The white chicks have so many advantages, the least black readers can do is to buy black-authored books.  But I really don’t like straight romance and soap opera stuff.  Will get out and search for the sisters my next shopping spree. 

I planned  to blog more about procrastination.  Then I came across this article:  Giving in to feel good: Why self-regulation fails.

The gist of the article was that we do the stuff we do because it feels good and we fail to do stuff that makes us feel like crap. 

Since I was just recovering from my awe at an article in USA today:  Study shows blacks don’t share similar views of world, articles that conclude the obvious were mainly pissing me off.  But I still need to post something.  So here it is…

The conclusion the article draws and the advice given is this:  The message to each of us should be clear as well. If we focus on our feelings in the short term, we’ll undermine ourselves in the long run.

Yep, force yourself to do what makes you feel like crap if it’s good for you.  Are you inspired yet?

I do still need my first cuppa coffee.  Going to go get it before I cause damage. 

It’s with books I get from the library, so needless to say there’s a dearth of black authors.  I’m also sorta broke for spending for extras.  The necessities are covered, the extras, such as blowing fifty or a hundred bucks on books is iffy.  I’m not complaining, I could have a RN  j-o-b.  I’d rather save up to spend.  It’s a fair trade-off.  I love a book buying binge.  I dying to read Deidre Savoy’s Body of Lies, Patricia Sargeant has one out I want to read, and a lot more. 

Fortunately I have one of Chassie West’s books and Angela Henry’s on hand already.  I got Iris Johanson, Tami Hoag, Sandra Brown and Lisa Gardner from the library.  I also got three of Nora’s In Death books because I haven’t read any of those yet and folks talk about them.  I’ve read Evanovitch, but I need to get the latest.  I don’t know if I could drag out a series that long…Lynn Emery has some suspense out there I need to get, and isn’t Beverly Jenkins doing that lately too?  Lots and lots or romantic sispense authors. 

I finished the Hoag and Gardner in a day.  (Library books first because I have to return them).  I ripped through Hide, but it straight suspense, no humor.  Same with Hoag, what was the title?  The setting was rich horsey folks in Palm Beach, FL.  Alibi Man was the title.  Both of them engaged me, but I preferred Gardner’s–mostly the storyline and setting, but Gardner does have a way with prose, I like her style. 

Any recommendations?  I want suspense with the romance in it.