Wednesday Midday Links: S&S gains offset by legal costs; Amanda Hocking is doing really well in traditional publishing; Kindle Fire refurb
Publishing NewsAmazon / lawsuits / Simon & Schuster21 Comments
The best deal today is $139 for a Refurbished Kindle Fire. This is sold by Amazon and comes with the same customer service.
Onto the News:
CBS Corporation Reports Record First Quarter 2012 Results – MarketWatch – “Publishing (Simon & Schuster) Publishing revenues for the first quarter of 2012 increased 14% to $176 million from $155 million for the same prior-year period, reflecting strong growth in the sales of more profitable digital content as well as higher print book sales. Sales of digital content increased 64% in the quarter and represented approximately 26% of Publishing’s total revenues, the highest to date. Best selling titles in the first quarter included Kill Shot by Vince Flynn and Lone Wolf by Jodi Picoult. The first quarter of 2012 also benefited from the continued success of fourth quarter releases Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson and 11/22/63 by Stephen King. Publishing OIBDA for the first quarter of 2012 increased 43% to $10 million from $7 million for the same prior-year period. This increase was primarily driven by growth in digital and print book sales, which was partially offset by higher costs related to legal matters.“ MarketWatch. No wonder S&S wanted to settle.
Amanda Hocking’s Blog: How Am I Doing Now? – “Switched came out January 3, 2012 with an initial print run of about 200,000 books in the US, and it’s in its fifth printing. Torn came out February 28, 2012, and I’m actually not sure of its initial print run, but it’s in its third printing. In a recent email from editor, she said that books in series tend to lose momentum as the series goes on with sequels doing slightly worse than the original, but she said that has not been the case with my books. Torn was outselling Switched and doing really well. Ascend came out last week, and my editor told me that my first week sales are already double that of Torn.” Amanda Hocking’s Blog. Trad publishing still serves a large role for many authors. It’s a great post and Hocking goes on to note she feels that her books are stronger due to the editing input. She also notes that Amazon rankings don’t reflect her sales because she had tapped out the market there before going to NY. I don’t see her going back to self publishing soon. She clearly enjoys the support she gets in terms of editing, marketing, and publicity.
Target to stop carrying Amazon Kindle hardware due to ‘conflict of interest’? | The Verge – “According to an internal Target memo we’ve received, the company will be removing Amazon hardware from its locations starting this month. Certain accessories will remain in stock, but shipments of Kindles themselves will cease as of May 13th. While several brick-and-mortar stores we contacted still had the devices in stock, a quick search through Target’s online store reveals that Amazon’s e-readers have already vanished, and the Kindle-branded online store comes up entirely empty. As of this writing, it’s unclear what the nature of the cited conflict of interest is, but it should be noted that Apple recently partnered with the retailer for a small number of “mini-stores” earlier this year. Whether the Kindle move is related — or has implications for Target’s own e-reader ambitions — still remains to be seen” The Verge This is really interesting and I have no idea how it will play out.
Huge rise in ebook sales offsets decline in printed titles | Books | guardian.co.uk – “This is a 366% increase on the previous year, the Publishers Association said, and consumer ebooks are now equivalent to 6% of consumer physical book sales by value. But the strong digital sales come at the expense of print, the yearbook reveals: consumer print sales were down by about 7% in 2011 to £1.579bn. And last year’s decline in print sales is continuing in 2012: £313.6m was spent on printed titles in the first quarter of this year, according to the Bookseller, the lowest first-quarter figure since 2003. Physical book sales in the first three months of 2012 were down 11%, or £39m, compared with the same period in 2011, the Bookseller says, with fiction down 18%, non-fiction down 9% and children’s down 2%.” Guardian UK This is the same pattern for digital books in the US.
Marius Milner, Google Wi-Fi snooping: Assessing the disturbing FCC report on the company’s Street View program. – Slate Magazine – “But Google, unlike other companies, wasn’t just recording the location of people’s Wi-Fi routers. When a Street View car encountered an open Wi-Fi network—that is, a router that was not protected by a password—it recorded all the digital traffic traveling across that router. As long as the car was within the vicinity, it sucked up a flood of personal data: login names, passwords, the full text of emails, Web histories, details of people’s medical conditions, online dating searches, and streaming music and movies. Imagine a postal worker who opens and copies one letter from every mailbox along his route. Google’s sniffing was pretty much the same thing, except instead of one guy on one route it was a whole company operating around the world. The FCC report says that when French investigators looked at the data Google collected, they found “an exchange of emails between a married woman and man, both seeking an extra-marital relationship” and “Web addresses that revealed the sexual preferences of consumers at specific residences.” In the United States, Google’s cars collected 200 gigabytes of such data between 2008 and 2010, and they stopped only when regulators discovered the practice.” Slate Seriously Google, this is awful.
Soon you’ll be able to use your Nook to buy books in Barnes & Noble stores — Tech News and Analysis – “On the heels of yesterday’s news that Microsoft is investing $300 million in Barnes & Noble’s Nook and college businesses, B&N CEO William Lynch says that the company plans to embed NFC (near field communication) chips into Nooks. Users could take their Nook into a Barnes & Noble store and wave it near a print book to get info on it or buy it.” GigaOM Not interested. Give me the option on my phone, yes. Waving my nook around? No.
Race in YA Lit: Wake Up & Smell the Coffee-Colored Skin, White Authors! « Sarah Ockler, Author – “White authors, white characters, white faces, white girls. The scenario isn’t entirely unlike my high school graduation, but it’s no longer the world I see (or want to see) when I look out the window. So why the disconnect? Plenty of YA authors of color are writing about diverse characters, often struggling to get those books out into the world and into the hands of readers. Discussions about the issue focus on a trifecta of economic challenges doused in racial politics: consumers aren’t demanding and buying diverse fiction. So booksellers aren’t stocking and promoting it. So the publishing industry isn’t actively seeking, acquiring, and publishing it (with covers and flap copy that appropriately reflect the characters and story). So consumers aren’t demanding and buying it…” Sara Hockler Such a good read.
OK, it’s official. Google, you’re evil.
Do not blame Google! Blame the user!
Not securing your Wifi network is just stupid.
Anyone in your neighourhood, or walking down the street can do exactly the same thing Google did, if you not secure your Wifi network. Even worse, people could misuse your Wifi network for all kind of illegal things.
Hocking is smart. Unfortunately, and this is partly the publisher’s fault, too many in the self-publishing world are angry and bitter and see traditional publishing as some type of evil empire. And like I said, this is partially the publishers fault. The elitism and at times downright cruelty they’ve displayed toward authors is legendary. However, that doesn’t mean that they’re of no benefit whatever. A smart writer knows it’s a good idea to utilize all the platforms available. Going forward I think most mid list authors will do some traditional and some self. And even best sellers will self pub their backlists.
The Google thing is downright creepy. Our wi-fi is password protected, but in using my iThing out and about I encounter plenty that are not. I wonder what those people are thinking.
B&N needs to rethink the Nook thing. If I’ve got my Nook why would I need to be in the bookstore. Is this supposed to be for those situations when they don’t have the book? Almost always for any black romance which is why I don’t bother bookstores anymore.
Yeah, I assumed the Kindle stuff would go buh-bye when Target partnered with Apple. That store isn’t big enough for those two monstrous egos. Maybe Kindle will partner with Wal-mart. A bit down market, but I have it on good authority that poor people do read. Is Wal Mart still the 800 # gorilla in paperbacks? That’s the frustrating thing about Target, their paperback selection sucks. They don’t carry Kimanis at all, which really sucks.
More about the incredible whiteness of being a fiction reader. I dunno, this feels so 2008, and I’m beyond over it.
***In a recent email from editor, she said that books in series tend to lose momentum as the series goes on with sequels doing slightly worse than the original***
I don’t understand this comment from the editor. If you’re #s drop with each book, you get dumped by your publisher. Sales are supposed to build as the series grows. That’s the whole point.
I don’t want to use my Nook to purchase print books in store. I was hoping they would set up something, where if I purchased a nookbook in a store, the store would get some credit for the sale.
Anyway, for Roslyn, I take my Nook to the store all the time to try a book I’m considering buying that doesn’t have a print version in the store. I have been burned by the so-called “sample” option so many times that I don’t even bother with them. In fact, it makes me want to not buy the book at all. An 8 page “sample” that is 7 pages worth of title, cover, publishing info, and 1 page of actual writing sample, is not a sample, in my opinion.
Sorry about the formatting of my comment. The bottom half is my question. Duh.
This. Seriously, why would they include that page full of random numbers and publishing information in a “sample”?
I set up my wifi so as to be secure as possible, but I know a bunch of my neighbours are wide open. I know this because my wifi was non-functioning for about a week and I didn’t notice, because I was unknowingly riding on the neighbours’ signals. And I do blame Google. Just because the network was open did not mean they had to go snooping. They chose to do that, and they would have gone on doing it if they hadn’t been called on it.
@Jenny Lyn: I think that they mean that the digital sales are replacements for the print sales and not in addition to.
@Geert: This.
If you walk around naked, people are going to look (and judge).
I take my Nook to B&N every time I take my kids. I never bother to look for books for myself because the romance aisle seems to be getting smaller and is now so vanilla it might as well be a grocery store.
I always did wonder why Target mmpb selection was so mediocre when compared to Walmart.
@Geert: That’s no different than saying a person standing on the street deserves to be shot because they didn’t wear a bulletproof vest that day. Yeah, maybe people could make better choices with their personal security, but that doesn’t mean we don’t blame the people who take advantage of them.
@CK: I don’t think it’s fair to say “walk around naked” I think a better analogy would be you are walking around naked in your own home with the windows open and Google is there with binoculars.
What I always think of is just because you leaved your door unlocked doesn’t give thieves the right to steal you blind.
Regardless of the analogy, it is creepy and wrong. And I also think that you should be responsible with yourself and lock your network (with a password that is not ‘password’ preferably).
@Geert: I can blame anyone I want for the bad choices they make. Yes, we should password protect our wifi. We should also lock our doors, and sure, we can call people who don’t do that stupid.
But knowing that some people don’t protect themselves properly, I still don’t choose go down the street checking to see which doors are unlocked so that I can steal stuff from those houses, and I don’t walk around my neighbourhood abusing other people’s wifi.
Google made a choice to do so (the latter, obviously), and they deserve criticism for that choice.
@Geert:
“Do not blame Google! Blame the user!
Not securing your Wifi network is just stupid.”
I don’t buy this. Yes, people should secure their networks, but that doesn’t mean the victim gets all the blame and the perpetrator gets exonerated. You don’t “deserve” to get robbed just because you accidentally left your door unlocked when you ran into the house with an armload of groceries.* I know that’s probably not what you meant, but I don’t think there’s anything that mitigates Google’s continuous, long-term bad behavior.
*Oops, I just saw that someone else used the same analogy, but it’s apt. Same as my coworker having his car stolen out of his driveway when he left the engine running as he ran back into the house for something he’d forgotten. It was stupid, but the thief is the one who chose to commit a crime. My coworker didn’t deserve to lose his car over a split-second bad decision. And people didn’t deserve to have all their private information stolen by a major company that should have known better.
The Nook thing almost makes me want to go into a B&N so I can see if there will be folks actually standing around waving their devices in the air.
Oh, and I was going to forward that link on the refurbished Fires so a couple of people who’ve been considering them, but when I checked there was only ONE available at the $139 price! Did they have a bunch that sold out that quickly? Wow.
I don’t know whether the publishers hate Amazon enough to only put B&N-readable chips in their books (particularly not at $1 per chip, as I’ve heard they cost).
And I’m not sure I’d want to junk up my device with all those reviews that I’d have to be deleting after a walk through a book store.
Of course, I didn’t like computer mice when they first came in, either – maybe I could grow to love the idea of chipped books readable by my ereader.
@Isobel
I think the average series tends to go downhill as it goes on. I just got a book from a series. The first 10-15 pages were backstory and waving by the previous series couples. Once it got going, it wasn’t a bad book, but I’d have put it down if I’d picked it up in a bookstore. I rarely care about waving even from couples whose stories I really liked. If a book is good, I believe in the HEA at the end of their book, I don’t need to read about the couple’s boring bliss and baby bump in the next book.
The other thing that happens is that when authors plan, say a 5 book series, they usually haven’t fleshed out the later books, but the characters who’ll feature in them get defined, making it hard to change them if the plot demands it.
@Jenny Lin
What they mean is that digital sales are replacing print sales. Same number (more or less) of books sold, just sold in a different format.
Sales is volume of units sold, occasionally taken as a proxy for revenue. Revenue is the money you get from the sales of those units. With a very low price, you can have high sales and low revenue. Profit is revenue minus expenses. You can have high revenue and if your costs are higher, you make a loss. This would be true if you have lots of interest to pay, high legal costs and other stuff that has little to do with whether you can sell lots of books with high mark-ups.
A statement about sales says nothing about costs or profits, although it’s a hint that revenue should be okay.
If they actually do the Nook thing, I hope they do a good job of it. I can see it now. Somebody walks down an aisle with their Nook on and accidentally buys every book in the aisle. LOL Hey, somebody has to think of it in order to prevent it from happening.
Blame isn’t either/or. It’s entirely possible to hold Party A responsible for doing something they oughtn’t have and also to hold Party B responsible for being careless and creating opportunity.
Save some blame for the broadband cable providers who set up wireless systems for customers with ridiculously easy passwords. And wireless routers that shipped from the company with the option of no security enabled. I was that person when I got my first wireless router and lucked out in the that a tech guy working at the doctor’s office next door cared enough to explain it to me.
I was fiddling with my router the other day and discovered a spot where the password to the wan was kept in plain text. If I hadn’t changed my administration password to the router anyone who could access my router would have the password. No thanks to Frontier who had not even wanted me messing with the advanced features.