Monday News: Parodies, Women ruining the prestige of YA, The Starbucks analogy, and KDP Success
Publishing Newsbook prices / Fair Use / genre critique / Intellectual Property Issues / value / Young-Adult13 Comments
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A prestige-free zone – Last week, I posted an article by Meghan Hewit at Atlantic about how YA literature has become dominated by women. Salon attempts to argue that the reason YA literature is not seeing the JD Salinger’s of old is because YA has lost its prestige. It’s being ghettoized by the vagina, you guys! Laura Miller, the author of the short Salon piece, offers no justification for this argument only that gynocracy is rubbing off the patina of prestige that YA once held. Salon.com
Pan Macmillan to parody The Casual Vacancy – Pan Macmillan is publishing a parody of JK Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy based solely on the jacket copy (cover art and fly leaf description). Is this the same thing as the Diamond Club, a crowd sourced parody of 50 Shades based solely on the cover and description of the books? One clear difference is that the Diamond Club is not marketed as a parody. It’s marketed as a book similar to 50 Shades but is, according to one of the authors of a chapter, “a book with no plot development, no character development and an over clocked sex drive.” I did think it was tremendously ironic that the creators of this “book” are so offended by the one star reviews being left for it. The Bookseller
Hey, Author,* About My $4 Coffee … – An author yesterday was upset when one of his readers complained about the over $13 price for the author’s ebook. In response, the author suggested that the reader enjoy his $4 cup of coffee. It might seem frustrating for the author to see readers spend more money on entertainment and luxury goods that the author measures his own work against, but as reader Liz points out, the coffee is not merely a two minute blend of milk and water. This is not to say that the author’s work is not worth $13 or that the author is wrong to value his work at more than $13, but “value” is determined by so much more than the author’s effort and the production but it also includes, to a great deal, what the consumer thinks it is worth. Something More
Stop Using The Cup of Coffee vs. $0.99 App Analogy – The cost cup of coffee versus cost of [insert whatever form of digital entertainment here] is prevalent in books and games. This app maker tries to break down why the analogy doesn’t work. The developer goes into a number of things that he thinks about when valuing a cup of expensive coffee presale including consistency; difficulty or perceived expenses in the creation of the item; and lower cost alternatives. When authors and app developers decry customers’ complaints about price, they are insulting their customer. Instead, the authors and app developers have to increase the perceived value in other ways – ways that don’t include denigrating a consumer’s valuation or choice. A Designer Life
My Brief Experiment Going Off KDP Select: At Least I Got This Nifty Blog Piece Out Of It! – We want authors to publish widely as readers. This is so that readers aren’t limited to one buying source (Amazon) and one device (the Kindle). However, the other retailers aren’t helping. The author of this post detailed how she felt that the two competing retailers: Kobo and B&N systems didn’t effectively promote her works as well as participating in the KDP program. I’m just not familiar enough with each self publishing program to assess whether the author was running an appropriate experiment or whether some action on her part was contribution to a non appearance on the B&N/Kobo lists. www.publetariat.com
Nielsen: More Teens Now Listen To Music Through YouTube Than Any Other Source – In spite of the headline, teens are still discovering music via traditional methods like radio but are consuming the music via new technologies like YouTube. Tech Crunch
The prevailing party – Universities and publishers have been engaged in a lawsuit over the fair use of copyrighted materials. Rulings were issued in a bench trial which essentially found that the universities had engaged in fair use. Of general interest was the boundary limitation that the judge placed on the size of the excerpts that could qualify as fair use. The judge noted that the longest permissible excerpt was 18.5% of the whole. More importantly, she ordered that the plaintiff publishers pay the attorneys fees and costs of the defendants because a large number of the copyright claims brought by the publishers were implausible to begin with and therefore the plaintiff publishers engaged in actions that significantly increased the cost to the defendants but without basis. Essentially this read like a Rule 11 Sanction against frivolous lawsuits. attorney’s fees incurred by Georgia State.” Scholarly Communications @ Duke
The Kindle Select article is very interesting. My own experience at the moment is that my self-published books are selling approximately 100 times as many copies at B&N as they are at Amazon. I think this is because one of my non-self-published books sold well at B&N for a while (it was in the top 100 contemporary romance books) and so there is a trickle down effect for the other books. I have never been tempted to try Kindle Select, because I object so much to the idea of limiting sales to one store/one device. But I must admit that having read the article, I can’t help wondering whether it would be worth it on a temporary basis, to boost the Amazon sales of the books, trusting that the B&N sales would pick up again afterwards. Hmm.
I like your new avatar, btw!
The article on KDP is a terrible experiment in the scientific sense of things.
If you want to know how B&N and Kobo recommend your books to people, the number one thing they base it off of is the prior sales record. If you take your book off sale at B&N for three months, the prior sales record is wiped, and the system thinks, “This book doesn’t sell for crap” and doesn’t recommend it to anyone. The very act of putting the book in KDP and taking it off sale on another venue, and then returning those books to paid status, biases the system against you. Of course you’re going to sell like crap–you just had three months where you sold like crap, and in digital sales, them that has, gets. Not to mention the fact that readers who had your book wishlisted on those sites had their wish list wiped, that people who heard about your book in those three months but only saw it on Amazon got annoyed with you, and so forth.
The thing that I found most telling about the article was this: When the author said she was going to try to get her books discovered on Kobo and Barnes and Noble, she didn’t mention a single thing that she was doing to get her books discovered by readers.
@Courtney Milan:
Courtney! You are the queen!!! Yes, you don’t know how many people I have tried to explain this to. The other thing that would clearly impact sales is the fact that her books were up on KDP select FIRST. Even though sales are more stretched out with e than with traditional it is still those first few months when all the buzz is being generated by blogs, social media, and advertising. By the time she got it up at BN any buzz there had been was most likely over and from her article it did not seem as though she attempted to generate and “new” buzz. Amazon KDP authors now have this self perpetuating myth that they can only sell their books through Amazon and other venues never work. It is SOOOO annoying as a reader (and Nook owner!)
I pay less than $1.50 for a coffee, I’d never buy any for much more, just as $5.99 are my limit for e-books and for that amount they had better be well above 350 pages and excellent as well. $13 I might just accept for a non-fiction book, where the hard copy is 5 to 10 times that price.
I interpreted the Salon article differently. I felt Miller was calling male authors on their sexism in avoiding YA because it’s a genre associated with women.
The biggest irony I see in this $4 coffee/$13 ebook snark war is that the people who’d plonk down $4 on a coffee are the same people who’d cheerfully pay $13 for an ebook.
Those of us who won’t pay that much for an ebook are the ones drinking $2 coffees from Dunkin Donuts.
@Janine: Oh – I thought she was calling male authors out on not doing YA because it’s not “prestigious” enough, regardless of the potential revenue stream. It may well be the reference to the Franzen-Oprah shenanigans that got me thinking about it that way.
Comparing pricing between coffee, ebookss, and apps – these are three different classes things. It’s not an apples to apples comparison. It’s quiche to kivas to suvs. It’s a nice little soundbite, I guess, but it’s not useful.
@Ridley: Exactly! I don’t pay for coffee at all. At work I only drink whats available and my boss pays roughly $0.54 per cup. I don’t drink coffee on the weekends.
So, Brent is telling me that he doesn’t want me to buy his books at all? (Am now PO’d that I bought his trilogy already).
@Ridley: A hearty third for this.
@Ridley: Bingo! That’s exactly what I thought when I read it. I DON’T buy $4 cups of coffee for the same reason I don’t buy $13 ebooks. They are rarely worth the expense.
And it’s also true it’s all about perception. Today I took my 15 yr old out to lunch while running errands, even though we were close enough to go home and save $12, which I would usually do. But today the one-on-one time with my daughter was worth the money because she was in a talkative mood. I don’t see any contradiction in saving 5 cents on a carton of yogurt and then spending money to go out to eat. The two things are actually very compatible. I save where I can so I can splurge where I want to.
@Carrie:
Bingo. I’m sorry if certain authors don’t share my value system, but *I* decide how best to budget my money. A $13 ebook is a no, but a $110 NHL ticket is a yes. Don’t like it? Not my problem.
His book would have to be worth four cups of coffee then. I can spend a lot of time chatting with friends over a coffee – granted these days I prefer tea or water.
Funnily enough before Borders closed I saw his books on the shelf and considered buying them for my husband. When I looked up reviews I decided not to get them. They were only two cups of coffee back then.
I prefer to only spend about $6 on a book, but I will buy a few ebooks at $10 (Robin Owens is one author). If a book is available in hard back I try and get it from the library, or else I wait until it comes out in paperback, or I just give it a miss.
My sons do spend a lot of time at you tube listening to music. I seem to remember one of them wants to buy some music soon. I wonder how long I can put it off? tee hee
I buy coffee once a month or not at all because I like the expensive sugar filled stuff. But the money I spend on other things has nothing to do with what I spend on books. I set aside a certain amount of money for books and if I can buy 5 books with that insead of 1 then well, its obvious right? My limit for books is about £3, although if an author is one I trust then I don’t mind spending up to £5 on it. I’d never spend more than that. I agree with the comments above- save where you can so you can splurge on other things.