Sex Sells, Right? Maybe Not. Why you Might Want to Rethink those Steamy Scenes in Your Novel

When my publisher asked me to remove the explicit sex scenes from my upcoming novel, The Lady of the Lakewood Diner I thought he was nuts. Sex sells, doesn't it?

Maybe not so much anymore.

That screeching sound you hear is the abrupt U-turn the publishing industry is taking away from erotic material.

A number of factors have contributed to the change:

1) Erotica Fatigue

After the breakout success of Fifty Shades of Grey, there was a surge in copycats, and the industry seems to be suffering from overload.

Agent Ginger Clark tweeted from the Frankfurt Book Fair that she was seeing a lot of "erotica fatigue" in traditional publishing.

2) The Global Marketplace

As we reported here last month, the marketplace for ebooks is now global, and as Smashwords' Mark Coker says, "Major retailers set their sights on a global market where the cultural, religious or political norms in some countries will find certain categories of erotica too objectionable."

3) Apple has No Erotica Category

More and more people read books on their iPads and iPhones, but Apple steers clear of anything that could be called porn. Perhaps with the global market in mind, the Apple store banned hard-core erotica over a year ago. The heavy-handed purge removed entire publisher accounts from the site because of a few offending titles. 

4) Amazon's "Erotica Ghetto"

Beginning last spring, Amazon, too, has sought to rein in the hard core stuff. It has created an "adult filter" that has been separating erotica from other books for suggestions and also-boughts. Authors find when they're put in this "erotica ghetto" it greatly reduces their sales.

5) No Sex, Please, We're British

In July of this year, the UK's Conservative government announced a "war on porn" that among other things, requires "family friendly" filters on computers and has made it illegal to possess material depicting rape.

6) The UK Tabloids' "Epidemic of Filth" Brouhaha

Worries about "An Epidemic of Filth" in the book industry escalated a couple of weeks ago, when UK tabloids brought up the problem of unvetted self-published porn, which can veer into illegal territory. The Daily Mail used it as an excuse for an anti-Amazon diatribe and the online magazine, The Kernel attacked even venerable UK retailers like W. H. Smith, Foyles and Waterstones. 

Retailers blame indies: 

Of course there's a lot of traditionally published erotica that gets into the wrong searches, too. But the tabloids chose some particularly vile examples of illegal porn that was self-published or put together by low-rent marketing companies, and people were disgusted.

Amazon simply removed the offending books immediately.

W. H. Smith, however, "solved" the problem by shutting down their entire website and not going back online until they had removed ALL self-published and small press books. Permanently.

Kobo, the mega-retailer that supplies W. H. Smith and many other bookstores worldwide, followed suit and removed all indie books from their UK site.  Kobo has since returned most of the books. They seem to have worked out an algorithm like the ones at Amazon and Smashwords to filter offending books. If your book hasn't been returned, you can contact them at writinglife@kobo.com

What this means for authors: 

Although the handful of books presented in the complaints were obviously offensive and illegal, the nuclear response sent a chill through the industry. You can read indie author Michelle Fox's take on the whole mess at the Indie Reader.

As Ms. Fox points out, aside from the question of censorship, the big problem is that algorithms are never 100% accurate. In fact, she reports some of the "offending books" mentioned in the Daily Mail article  weren't offensive at all.

She says Amazon's erotica filter sometimes labels a book cover as porn just because it has a face on it. It seems the algo measures pixels of skin tones, so a baby's face will show as large a percentage of skin as hard core porn and can be labeled as such. And I've also heard that Amazon's algo originally put Fifty Shades of Grey into "Christian fiction" because the protagonist's name is "Christian". That may be an urban legend, but anybody who's received Amazon's title suggestions knows they often get things comically wrong.

Amazon's algos are constantly being revised and updated. They may get more restrictive following the recent bad press. 

Smashwords' Mark Coker thinks they will.

Mr. Coker said this on his blog on October 15th: "Smashwords erotica authors can now assume that erotic fiction where the predominant theme, focus, title, cover image or book description is targeted at readers who seek erotic stories of incest, pseudo-incest or rape will find that their content is not welcome at the Kobo store. I've heard multiple reports that Amazon is cracking down on the same." 

Smashwords was one of the first retailers to deal with the erotica filtering problem, when PayPal refused to deal with them unless they censored hard-core erotica. Erotica was banned for several weeks in 2012 until Mark Coker installed a new filter and made a deal with PayPal, so they're now ahead of the game.

Now it seems the Smashwords filter developed for PayPal isn't restrictive enough for Kobo and Apple, so Coker is working on a "two tier" system for erotica.

He says: "Smashwords is considering adding new metadata fields for erotica authors so they can voluntarily tag their books as NSFAK (not safe for Apple/Kobo), but because these titles meet the Smashwords Terms of Service they are allowed at Smashwords and other Smashwords retailers. This will allow us to omit certain books from certain distribution channels while maintaining the flow to the Smashwords store and others."

There's no question that some filtering was needed. Parents were understandably freaked when their kids got suggestions to read wildly inappropriate books. And not every adult is into kink. The "romance" category is a huge umbrella these days, and cover images can be pretty shocking to people who aren't used to looking at contemporary erotica.

But because the filtering is done by robots, a lot of mistakes happen. And the algos are secret, so nobody knows what words and images will tag your book as porn.

If you write erotica and want to know what might trigger the algos, there's a breakdown here at Smutwriters.

But what if you don't write erotica? It's bad enough for an erotic book to be shifted off to an "adult" section, but if your novel only has a few sex scenes, erotica buyers will think it's totally lame, but nobody else will see it.

This means that being flagged for adult content could kill your book dead.

That's why publishers like mine figure it's better to be safe than sorry. If you can tell your story without explicit language and descriptions of body parts, you might consider leaving them out, since those are most likely to trigger the algos.

I've deleted "f" bombs as well as explicit scenes from my new novel. It was too long anyway, and I don't think the story loses anything.

But does this herald a return to the Puritanism that banned books like Lady Chatterley's Lover and Lolita? Are we going to return to something like the Hays Code and let algorithms become the new Catholic Legion of Decency?

I don't think so.  

Michael Tamblyn at Kobo wrote in the Writing Life on October 25, "Many of our readers have no problem with an erotic title in their library next to their romance, literary fiction, investing or high-energy physics books. And we are here for the readers, so erotica stays, a small but interesting part of a multi-million-title catalogue, in all of its grey-shaded glory."

But, he cautions, "…if your dream is to publish "barely legal" erotica or exploitative rape fantasies, distribution is probably going to be a struggle for you. We aren’t saying you can’t write them. But we don’t feel compelled to sell them."

If you need another reason to avoid explicit sex scenes, consider this quote from Julian Barnes, "Writing about sex contains an additional anxiety on top of all the usual ones: that the writer might be giving him or herself away, that readers may conclude, when you describe a sexual act, that it must already have happened to you in pretty much the manner described."

For more quotes from famous writers on the subject, check out the great post from Roland Yeomans called "Sex, Must We?" at Writing in the Crosshairs.

And good sex scenes are awfully tough to write well. If you don't get it right, you could be shamed by the "annual bad sex award" from the UK's Literary Review. Here's a link to this year's nominees. They're pretty bad.

With so much explicit "mommy porn" available to peruse discretely on our e-readers, maybe the time has come when we no longer need to sprinkle our mainstream books with those titillating scenes that became de rigueur in the heyday of "steamy" novels by authors like Jacqueline Susann and Harold Robbins. (As Spock called them in Star Trek IV..."the giants.")

At the moment, I think writers need to treat sex scenes like adverbs. We should always ask ourselves, "is this necessary to the story?"

What about you, scriveners? Have you been affected by the recent erotica purge? Do you think sex scenes are necessary in mainstream novels, or would you prefer that authors leave things to the imagination? And do you remember that scene in Star Trek IV? 

Coming up: Next week we'll  have a great guest post by Melodie Campbell, Executive Director of Crime Writers of Canada. She teaches writing as well as being a bestselling author of comic fiction. She's going to give us a hilarious lesson in humor writing.

A note to my Canadian readers: My boxed set of Camilla comic mysteries has been selling briskly in Canada (and had reached #2 in women's fiction) until I got a sock puppet one-star review on the Amazon CA buy page this week. This now registers it as a one-star book, in spite of 50 good reviews in the US, so Canadian sales have screeched to a halt. If any Canadian reader who enjoys comedy would like to give it a fair review, contact me for a free review copy at annerallen dot allen at gmail dot com.

BOOK OF THE WEEK

Okay, Halloween is over, but it's a nice spooky cover for this time of year

only $2.99 at Amazon US, Amazon CA, Amazon UK, NOOK, Kobo, and iTunes

Set at a Writers' Conference in Central California, Ghost Writers in the Sky is #2 in the Camilla Randall series of comedy-mysteries, but it can be read as a stand-alone. 

"Ghost Writers is set in a writers' conference in Santa Ynez Valley, where I've lived for twenty years....This book is hysterically funny AND accurately depicts the Valley. Anne Allen gets it right, down to the dollar bills stuck on the ceiling of the Maverick Saloon. It was so fun to read as she called out one Valley landmark after another. Allen got the local denizens right, too, the crazy characters that roam our streets...I love Camilla Randall, her ditzy, former debutante heroine, and all the rest. The action gets pretty frenetic when dead bodies start showing up. I heartily recommend this book. I can hardly wait to read the rest of the series"...Sandy Nathan

OPPORTUNITY ALERTS

Tin House Shirley Jackson Story Contest. This is a fun one. The prestigious litmag Tin House has acquired an unfinished Shirley Jackson story. They invite readers to finish it. Submissions should be 2,500 words or fewer (not including Jackson’s prose). Entries should be sent, with the text of the story in the body of the e-mail to shirleyjacksoncontest@tinhouse.com. Winners will be published on the Tin House website and be awarded some Tin House swag and the collected works of Ms. Jackson. Deadline November 17th.

J.F. POWER PRIZE FOR SHORT FICTION NO ENTRY FEE. The winner will receive $500. The winning story will be announced in February, 2014 and published in Dappled Things, along with nine honorable mentions. The word limit is 8,000 words. Deadline is November 29, 2013.

The Lascaux Prize for Short Fiction: Stories may be previously published or unpublished. Length up to 10,000 words. Entry fee is $5, and authors may enter more than once.The editors will select a winner and nineteen additional finalists. The winner will receive $500 and publication in The Lascaux Review. Both winner and finalists will earn the privilege of displaying a virtual medallion on blogs and websites. Deadline December 31, 2013.

Boomers: The Huffington Post's Huffpo50 is publishing short fiction! The rules: You must be 50 or older to enter. Writers can submit only one story per year, and all pieces must be 5,000 words or less. Send your original submissions, as well as your contact details, to 50fiction@huffingtonpost.com

CRAZYHORSE PRIZES IN FICTION, NONFICTION, POETRY $20 fee (includes subscription). This is a biggie, well worth the fee. This venerable literary magazine has published the likes of John Updike, Raymond Carver and Billy Collins. Winners in each category receive $2,000 and publication. Submit up to 25 pages of prose or three poems. All entries considered for publication. Submissions accepted in the month of January 2014 only.

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The Ebook Market No Author Should Ignore: Think Globally!

One of the biggest changes the e-reader has brought to the publishing industry doesn't get much cyberink in the online book community.

It's the huge international market that's opening up now that we don't have to pay to ship physical books around the world.

If, like me, you've ever experienced that terrible moment on vacation when you discover you have nothing left to read in your native tongue but a copy of Henry James' The Golden Bowl you got in trade for your last Agatha Christie in that Athens hostel...you know how tough it used to be to find English language books abroad.

But no more!

The e-age has given us a global book market.

This weekend, some health challenges kept me from the Central Coast Writers Conference—a big disappointment—but it allowed me to stay home and see the first installment of PBS's series of Shakespeare's history plays, dubbed "The Hollow Crown." I got to watch a breathtaking production of Richard II. It contains some of Shakespeare's most eloquent love-letters to the mongrel language we call English.

Since I had just received this post on the international book market, I felt a small sense of irony when James Purefoy as Mowbray spoke those famous words protesting his exile from the Sceptered Isle.

"The language I have learn'd these forty years,

My native English, now I must forego:
And now my tongue's use is to me no more
Than an unstringed viol or a harp."

In the 21st century, exile is not so harsh. As Jay and the crew at Ebook Bargains UK tell us in this week's post: a whole lot of people all over the world now speak English.

They read it, too.

Which means there's a global market for ebooks in English that indie authors can tap into—with no worries about translation, shipping, or "foreign rights."

But most authors who write in English still focus on selling exclusively in the U.S. That worked for some of the big indie success stories a few years ago, but this is a rapidly changing industry.

Do you know the country where people read the most books? I sure didn't. According to a July article in the L.A. Times, it's India. And you know where the second biggest population of English speakers lives? Again, it's India. Followed by Pakistan and Nigeria.

Combined, those three countries make up a larger population of English speakers than in all of the US.

I've mentioned in several posts recently that I've been getting a boost in my sales outside the US thanks to a new ebook promo newsletter that's venturing where the big US advertisers like BookBub, Kindle Nation Daily and Pixel of Ink don't go: the international markets.

For those of you who aren't published yet, you may not know the ebook bargain newsletter is rated by many as the most effective way for new authors to get noticed. Buying ads in daily newsletters like Kindle Nation Daily, E-Reader News Today, Pixel of Ink, and Bookbub is one of the best ways to get a new book in front of readers.

But they have some big drawbacks:

• They're pricey. 
• They only sell to the US. 
• They demand a huge number of Amazon reviews: reviews on blogs, newspapers, or on other retail sites don't count. 
• Most only link to Amazon.

I'm lucky my publisher connected with EbookBargainsUK (EBUK for short) early, so we got in on some of their initial freebie ads. But the ads are still remarkably low priced, and I have seen direct results. After a "spotlight" week in the newsletter, my boxed set reached #2 in Canadian women's fiction: right between Margaret Atwood's latest and the new Bridget Jones. A fantasy come true for a longtime fan of both Atwood and Fielding. It also charted in France, Germany and Brazil.

The EBUK newsletters don't have all the bells and whistles of the big American promoters, and they've only been going a few months, but as co-founder Jay Housden explained to me, what they lack in budget and fancy tech they make up for in enthusiasm and ambition.

A whole lot of ambition, as you'll see below.

And okay, I have a thing for all things Brit, as my readers know. (Yes, the next Camilla adventure will take us back to Swynsby-on-Trent. And there's a possible future jaunt to India, where Camilla's etiquette books are very big. Funny how our fiction can sometimes be predictive.)

EBUK's newsletters target English-speakers all over the world. And as they will tell you, ebooks are already a major factor in the global marketplace.

I'm a little embarrassed by my ignorance about this stuff. I didn't have a clue my books were on all these international sites. If you don't have a savvy publisher like mine, you may want to use self-publishing sites like Smashwords or D2D who will automatically put you on most of the international retail sites.

I know this piece is more promotional than what we usually accept, but I was so blown away by the info, I had to share it with you. Plus I'm a big fan of Mark Coker at Smashwords, and he echoes their vision in a great post about the Indian market here. Smashwords is working at putting indies into as many of these markets as possible. It looks as if this will make Smashwords a much bigger player in a few years.

Maybe someday, like Camilla in No Place Like Home, you'll be able to put a down payment on a little cottage with the proceeds from your international sales.

So Mick, Jay and the EBUK tech geniuses—take it away!
                                                                                                             ...Anne

Why Every Author Should Start Thinking Globally

by the EBUK Team

Given we only launched Ebook Bargains UK (EBUK) this summer, on a shoe-string budget from a bedroom in Bedford, with the impossible ambition of promoting English-language ebooks to a world that supposedly doesn’t know ebooks exist, we’re pretty pleased with how things are going.

We started the first EBUK newsletter because we were tired of seeing newsletters that only linked to Amazon—usually only Amazon US. We'd search for the book on Amazon.co.uk or another UK site, and find it wasn't on sale to us.

We also wanted to know about ebook bargains to be found at our own UK bookshop sites, like Foyles, Waterstones, W.H. Smith, Tesco etc.

We soon realized such a newsletter would be useful in Canada and Australia and India...and English speaking countries all over the world. So our one newsletter rapidly expanded to ten. We hope to have twenty by the end of the year.

Okay, so right now our number of subscribers is pitiful compared to BookBub's million. But it's important to bear in mind EBUK is targeting the nascent markets, not a mature market like the United States. The vertical expansion (subscribers) is inevitably going to be slow to start. But the list is growing daily.

We believe the international English-language ebook market will dwarf the US market in the coming years. Which is why we’re happy with our gradual vertical expansion and are instead focused on our lateral expansion – reaching out to readers around the globe.

By the time you read this we will have just launched Ebook Bargains S.E. Asia, the twelfth of our international newsletters. By no coincidence it coincides with the launch of the new Kobo store in the Philippines.

The S.E. Asia newsletter (Not just the Philippines but Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia, etc) will join daily promo newsletters already shipping to:

• Australia
• Canada
• Germany
• India
• Ireland
• the Netherlands
• New Zealand
• South Africa
• Spain
• UK
• USA

Ebook Bargains France, Italy and Scandinavia will be following next month, with another five to add before the year’s end.

Each daily newsletter carries the same titles, but the Australia newsletter only has links to retailers available in Australia. The German newsletter only has links to retailers available in Germany. The Dutch newsletter only has links to retailers in the Netherlands. Etc.

Ebooks Down Under

Guess what? Oz has been selling ebooks since the last century.

You’ve probably never heard of ebooks.com but they’ve been selling ebooks since 1997, ten years before Amazon introduced the Kindle – and are still going strong.

Amazon is estimated to have just over a 60% market share in Australia, which means four out of ten readers are shopping elsewhere.

Some of you may be familiar with Angus & Robertson and Collins, both supplied by Kobo.

What you probably don’t know is that Australians can also buy ebooks from:

• Booktopia, 
• Bookworld
• Dymocks
• QBD
• Fishpond 
• Here’s our host Anne R. Allen in Bookworld.
• Then of course there’s the Apple iTunes Australia store
• and the GooglePlay Australia store. 
• And not forgetting the Sony Australia Reader Store. 

Sony have been quietly reinventing themselves while your back has been turned and now have seven international stores – here’s Anne R. Allen in their Australian store.

Even the German ebook retailer 'txtr (no, that’s not a typo) has an ebook store in Australia. And guess who’s got her ebooks there...

All these stores are selling ebooks to Australians in Australian dollars. Well, all except Amazon. They haven’t got a local store yet. And Australians have plenty of devices to read on. Not just Kindles and the now ubiquitous Kobo range, either.

Then there’s the indie stores! Sydney bookstore Pages & Pages has been tempting patriotic Aussies to trade in their Kindle for AU$50 and buy a BeBook ereader instead. And for every AU$50 you spend on books or ebooks in a month in their store you get a AU$5 discount the following month.

Don’t under-estimate the niche marketing power of indie bookstores as they turn digital, be they in Australia, New Zealand, the UK or the USA.

What about Europe?

Most people know there's an Amazon store in Germany (Amazon.de) But you may not know there are many others:

• The Kobo store is Germany’s biggest ebook store by far. 
• There's also an Apple iTunes Germany. 
• Anne's here in the 'txtr Germany store. 
• And here in Thalia. 
• And she’s only in Buecher too.
• And Sony Reader Store Germany, which is running a nice little discount on Anne R. Allen’s titles right now. 

Sony also have a Reader Store in neighbouring Austria, and guess who’s there....

In fact there seems to be no escape from Anne R. Allen.  It would be easier to tell you where she isn’t!

Here’s Anne R. Allen in Ireland’s prestigious Eason ebook store in Dublin. Eason will shortly be releasing their own ereader. 

Her ebooks are even in Iceland!

The Netherlands? No Amazon store there yet, so no Anne R. Allen, right? Ah, but there is:

• A local Dutch language Kobo store. 
• And an Apple iTunes Netherlands store
• And a GooglePlay Netherlands store
• And of course a ‘txtr Netherlands store 

(Here’s Anne R. Allen for Dutch buyers in ‘txtr NL). And that’s before we start on the local competition: local Dutch ebooks stores. The Dutch retailer Bol has been busily selling ebooks in Holland since 2009, the same year Amazon launched KDP in the US.

No doubt you’ve been reading excitedly about the new US start-ups offering ebooks subscription stores.

Guess what? Skoobe in Germany and 24 Symbols in Spain have been doing it for years.

Denmark has two rival ebook subscription services, Riidr and Mofibo.

Incidentally 24 Symbols is dual language Spanish and English, acknowledging the huge number of Brit expats living in Spain with nothing to read. Come to that Skoobe is dual language, too.

 Far more people speak English in Germany than most people imagine. How does 40 million English speakers in Germany grab you?

The truth is, Europe is an untapped ebook goldmine. 

GooglePlay has figured that out. They already had ebook stores in the USA, Canada, UK, Australia, Germany, France, Spain and Italy as of July this year. Oh, and also Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Ireland, Japan, Mexico, Portugal, South Korea and Russia. Pretty impressive.

Then across the summer they rolled out additional ebook stores in the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Greece, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland and Romania. That’s twenty-seven ebook stores around the world. So far. Not in GooglePlay? Might be worth the effort.

Then there’s that bizarrely named 'txtr (no capital, the apostrophe is compulsory, and despite the lack of vowels they are German, not Welsh) has no less than seventeen ebook stores around the globe. Mostly in Europe, including a 'txtr UK store, and also in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and America.

And 'txtr has some big surprises lined up. You may never have heard of them until now, but if you’re not in the ‘txtr international stores then you will be missing out on some big opportunities ahead. Here's Anne in ‘txtr Ireland. And in ‘txtr Poland.

Africa

Here’s Anne R. Allen in ‘txtr South Africa. South African readers can also buy Anne’s books in the local Kalahari store, where they might choose to read on the local gobii e-reader rather than a Kindle or the Kobo devices sold nationwide by the country’s biggest supermarket chain Pick-N-Pay.

Nor is it just Europe, South Africa and Down Under that have been busily enjoying ebooks. 

Latin America

Over in Latin America you’ll be surprised (or maybe not by now) to learn they don’t just have the Amazon Brazil and Amazon Mexico stores to buy from.

Here’s Anne R. Allen in Livraria Cultura in Brazil. Okay, no more plugs for Anne’s titles (thanks guys...I was feeling a little embarrassed by all that...Anne) You get the picture.

And the rest of Latin America? BajaLibros is third largest Spanish language ebook store in the United States, and they’ve been selling ebooks in Argentina since 2010, the same year the Kindle arrived in the UK. They produce their own ereaders which, along with their ebooks, are sold across Latin America and also in Spain.

Wonderful as it was to see the Kindle store arrive in Brazil, and more recently Mexico, the truth is Latinos were buying ebooks long before. Here’s BajaLibros in Brazil. And here in Mexico. They also have stores in Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela, not to mention Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. BajaLibros produce their own ereaders too.

Argentina was the UNESCO Book Capital in 2011, and earlier this year managed to cram over one million visitors into the Buenos Aries Book Fair, so let’s be in no doubt Argentines like reading.

But don’t go thinking BajaLibros is the only ebook show in town.

Grammata have also been selling ebook and ereaders in Argentina since 2010, and are now pretty much everywhere where Spanish is spoken. Here in Colombia, for example. They’re even in Spain! And if you don’t fancy buying from Grammata, pop along to Movistar (started 2011, has own ereader) or try Amabook. Amabook too has ebook stores across Latin America, as well as in the US! And it too beat Amazon to Mexico.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. An iceberg growing at a phenomenal rate.

Ebooks are being sold on six of the seven continents.

But let’s end where we began, in Asia

In Thailand Kobo is working hard to launch a Thai store, but meantime local retailer Ookbee has well over 80% of the market. Ookbee already has a three million strong customer base and is currently picking up new customers at the rate of 6,000 a day. Ookbee launched in Malaysia this summer, where it picked up 100,000 customers in its first two months.

They are opening an ebook store in Vietnam where competition is already fierce from Aleeza and Biitbook `– Biitbook even has its own self-pub portal!

Ebooks have been slow to come to the Philippines. But that all changed this month with the launch of the Kobo Philippines store, in partnership with the National Book Store chain, which now sells both print and ebooks to Filipinos.

What if we told you National Book Store is not a translation from the local Tagalog language. Most of the signs in store – and most of the books – are in English? 

There are 75 million English speakers in the Philippines. More than the entire population of the UK!

Did we mention we launched Ebook Bargains S.E. Asia this week?

China is not the easiest market to get into, but just this month OverDrive signed a major distribution deal with the Chinese authorities, which means their entire catalogue will be available to Chinese readers in due course.

At Ebook Bargains UK we are trying to stay a few steps ahead as we watch the international ebook market blossom. What we lack in fancy high-tech websites and slick newsletters (that will come as the advertising revenue builds) we make up for in knowledge of the international ebook scene and unbridled enthusiasm. 

We produce regular helpful newsletters for authors about how to reach and promote in these markets.

We all know how difficult it is to break into a mature ebook market. Most best-selling indies got in to either the US or the UK markets very early on. Very few have managed to do well in both.

But what is happening now is unprecedented in publishing history. In the old world, book distribution was physical. It was simply not viable to print and distribute English language books en masse even to countries like Australia or New Zealand, let alone Iceland or Indonesia, or Paraguay or Papua New Guinea.

Digital changes all that. Here’s some numbers for you.

There are about 150 million English-speakers in India, and while local languages books and ebooks

are available, the ebook retailers’ sales report mostly English-language titles selling, and with increasing rapidity. The question is how to get your books noticed and bought in this huge potential market.

Indians have been enjoying ebooks for several years. The Amazon India store is actually a bit of a late-comer. Way back in 2011 Indian retailers were selling Android tablets for... wait for it... $35. And buying ebooks from local stores like Flipkart, Infibeam and Pothi. Here’s Anne R. Allen in India’s Infibeam, the country’s second biggest ebook retailer after Flipkart. (OK, but that's the last one, guys...Anne)

Flipkart? India’s on-line giant Flipkart has an estimated 80% market share. 

As of this month Smashwords is distributing ebooks in India. 

You can also upload direct to another key Indian ebook retailer, Pothi. Along with Amazon India that’s a great base from which to become a future indie best-seller on the sub-continent, if only readers there knew your books existed. (Say, did we mention we have an Ebook Bargains India newsletter?)

But back to those numbers. When we said we expect the international English-language ebook market to dwarf the US market we weren’t joking.

In just India, Pakistan and Nigeria, the number of English-speakers exceeds the entire population of the United States!

And the rest of the world? Well, there’s upwards of 75 million English speakers in the Philippines as we’ve mentioned already. Over 40 million English speakers in Germany. 30 million in Bangladesh. 30 million in Egypt. 25 million in France. 20 million in Italy. 17 million in Thailand. 15 million in the Netherlands. 15 million in South Africa. 12 million in Poland. 12 million in Turkey. 11 million in Iraq. 10 million in Spain. 10 million in China.

Then there’s Brazil, Sweden, Kenya, Cameroon, Malaysia, Russia, Belgium, Israel, Zimbabwe, Romania, Austria and Greece, all with between 5 and 10 million English speakers each.

A very conservative estimate puts the number of English-speakers outside the USA at around 750 million, quite apart from the UK (60m) , Australia (20m), New Zealand (4m) and Canada (25m).

Because of the logistics of print distribution English-language print books have never even begun to approach their true sales potential. Digital changes everything.

And you have a chance to get a foot on the first rung of the international ladder now, before everyone else does.

How to find and get into these retailers you’ve never heard of and promote in countries you thought were still reading on parchment? That’s where we come in.

One small fee (and we do mean small – prices start at just $5 a day) will get you in however many international newsletters we have. Right now that’s $5 to appear in twelve newsletters going around the globe. The small fees reflect the small returns you should expect at this stage given these are nascent markets and our subscriber base is still building. Be realistic. But every paid ad gets a credit for a free ad of equal value, so effectively it’s two for one. And there are plenty of listing options. We’re a little bit different from all the other newsletters out there.

You can find links to the daily newsletters on our Facebook page. And connect with us on Google+. You can subscribe to the reader newsletters by country /region, sign-up for the authors’ newsletter, or check out the author page on our website. 

We all dream of becoming a truly international bestselling author. Ebook Bargains UK can help make that dream come true.

***

Pretty amazing stuff, isn't it, scriveners? (Although I think the penguin community should lobby for an Antarctica ebook store.) The guys say they're going to check in on the blog when it goes live on Sunday (nighttime in the UK.) So ask your questions. I know I have some. Like how hard is it to get into all these bookstores? Ask away....

Book Bargain of the Week

Sale extended! No Place Like Home is still 99c

 on Amazon US, Amazon UK, and Amazon CA (and yes, after reading this post, I'm going to get my publisher to take it out of Select and make it available on other platforms, lickity split!...Anne)

"A warp-speed, lighthearted comedy-mystery"...Abigail Padgett

"A fun, charming novel about the rich and less so" ...Karen Doering

"A cross of dry British humor and American wackiness, and it all adds up to a fun read." Deborah Bayles

OPPORTUNITY ALERTS

The Harper's Bazaar UK Short Story Prize is open to all writers. NO ENTRY FEE. Are you the next Dorothy Parker or Anita Loos? Submit an original short story (up to 3,000 words) on the subject of 'spring' to:shortstory@harpersbazaar.co.uk. The winning entry will appear in the May 2014 issue. Its author will be able to choose a first-edition book from Asprey's Fine and Rare Books Department to the value of £3,000 and enjoy a week-long retreat at Eilean Shona House, on the 2,000-acre private island off the west coast of Scotland where JM Barrie wrote his screenplay for Peter Pan. Deadline December 13th.

The Rumpus has launched the Weekly Rumpus and is calling for submissions. They are interested in "sharp, fresh, original work that grapples with life as it is really lived and felt in the world today. We want writing that walks on a wire, questions conventions, conveys a vision." 1000-6000 words. Here's their submissions page.

Quirk Books "Looking for Love" contest. They offer a $10,000 prize for the best quirky love story of 50,000 words or more. Visit the Quirk Books website to download the entry form or for further information. Quirk Books was founded in 2002 and publishes around 25 books each year. Their bestselling titles include Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. Entries close October 1.

SMOKE AND MIRRORS podcasts. Get your short story recorded FREE for an online podcast! Fantastic publicity if your story is accepted by SMOKE AND MIRRORS. They broadcast about three stories a week. Spooky, dark tales preferred. No previous publication necessary. They judge on the story alone.

WILD LIGHT CONTEST for poets. The $25 entry fee is a little pricey, but this is run by the prestigious Red Hen Press and offers a prize of $1,000 and publication in The Los Angeles Review. Submit up to three poems of up to 200 lines each. Deadline October 15, 2013.

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What are Algorithms—and are They Killing the "Kindle Revolution"?

First, an awesome announcement: this blog will be named to Writer's Digest's Best 101 Sites for Writers in the May-June issue! (special thanks to Lila and Janet for the heads-up.) We are so jazzed! The magazine should be in stores soon. Subscribers have already got their copies. Many, many thanks to whoever nominated us!! 

To celebrate this exciting news, my publisher has made all my mysteries 99 cents until the end of April. That's at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. This includes The Gatsby Game,  Food of Love, and the Camilla Randall Mysteries, either as the boxed set or singly, and No Place Like Home, usually $4.99 (still only at Amazon, alas.) Click those links or click through the book covers in the sidebar. Here's my author page at Barnes and Noble.

And Ruth Harris has joined in, making her Park Avenue Boxed Set only 99 cents as well. (That's 33c a book!) 

OK, we hear about them all the time, but what the *%@# are algorithms, anyway?

An algorithm is a line of code that gives a search engine a step-by-step process to produce a desired result: like a list of websites, a bra that fits, or a suggestion for the next title to put on your TBR list.

They aren't new. In fact they were invented in the 8th century AD by a Persian guy named Abū ʿAbdallāh Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmi . The word "algorithm" or "algorism" is a corruption of his name: al-Khwarismi.

But in the digital age this venerable type of formula has taken on a huge importance for the marketplace. An algorithm can make or break sales of any product online. As superstar author Hugh Howey said in an interview on Reddit, “I'm guessing 90% of my sales are from reader recommendations and Amazon algorithms.”

Or as his interviewer called them "the inscrutable Amazon algos."

They're sure not scrutable to me. I'm pretty sure they have to do with math, at which I suck. Seriously. I had to be counseled for “math anxiety” in high school.

Besides, algorithms aren’t that easy to define—even for the people who work with them. The Wikipedia article says, “While there is no generally accepted formal definition of 'algorithm,' an informal definition could be 'a set of rules that precisely defines a sequence of operations.' For some people, a program is only an algorithm if it stops eventually; for others, a program is only an algorithm if it stops before a given number of calculation steps”

Yeah, right. If you’re like me, your eyes have started to glaze over already. Secretly, I think of them as little robot elves who get things done inside my computer.

Like bringing up 64,300,000 links in .52 seconds when you put the word “algorithm” into Google’s search window.

Pretty durn clever, these elves. And kind of Big Brothery. They're what Facebook uses to analyze your “Likes” and figure out if you’re gay, conservative and/or smart.

They’re not infallible. They're responsible for sending you those emails from Amazon suggesting you buy or review your own book, and they're the reason you got spammed with dozens of ads for refrigerators after you accidently Googled “fridge” instead of “fudge” last week.

But they work well enough that businesses increasingly depend on them. A new online lingerie retailer, True&Co, uses a questionnaire and an algorithm to sell mail-order bras—a product that’s difficult to fit even in real-life dressing rooms. According to the NYT, at True&Co “women end up buying more of the bras chosen by the algorithm than the ones they select themselves.”

As you might imagine, online book retailers depend heavily on algorithms to get books in front of the people who might buy them.

David Gaughran talked about the complexity of Amazon’s algorithms in making Amazon’s bestseller lists on his blog, Let’s Get Digital.

“Amazon has a bevy of Bestseller Lists, all split into Free and Paid listings. The big one is theTop 100 in the Kindle Store, and placement on this list can drive staggering amounts of sales. This list is populated with items ranked #1 to #100 in the overall Kindle Store, which includes not just e-books, but also things like games, magazines, and newspapers.

The exact algorithm Amazon uses to assign a Sales Rank to each book is a closely-guarded secret, but the general make-up is easy to deduce. Simply put, your Sales Rank tells you how many books are selling more than you at this moment in time (it’s updated hourly). However, it also takes account of historical sales. More recent sales are weighted much more heavily in the algorithm, though, and velocity plays a big part too (how much your sales are increasing at that moment in time). There’s a lot more to it, but those are the basics.”

David talks more about how Amazon’s algorithm-driven recommendation engines work in a post from February 2013.

But the most important thing to know about the algorithms book retailers use is that they CHANGE. Those robot elves are programmed by real people—who are constantly inputting new data.

Mark Coker changed algorithms at Smashwords last year to encourage authors to stop devaluing their work by giving away so many free books.

Mr. Coker said, “At Smashwords, up until January of this year [2012], our algorithm for best sellers just looked at absolute downloads, but authors gamed that system by offering discounted or free books using the Smashwords coupon tool. So we changed our algorithm to focus on gross sales, so now when you look at the Smashwords best seller list, you’re looking at absolute dollar sales, which we are using as a representation of the interest of customers.”

Amazon changes its algorithms more often than Smashwords. Which means a whole lot of the “rules” you hear about how to sell big on Amazon are based on algorithms that no longer exist.

If you're in the indie author scene, you've no doubt heard a ton of rumors about what the Amazon algorithms will reward or penalize. You’ll hear that more than 50—or 100—“likes” will get more recommendations, or any 3-star or lower reviews will exclude you from the also-boughts or downgrade your author rank. Or that uploading from a non-US country downgrades your status, or dissing Amazon in their forums will be reflected in your sales ranking. Some of these may be true or may have once been true, but they’re hard to prove. And trying to game them generally isn't a good idea.

That's because the one thing we do know for sure about algorithms is that Amazon does not like it when you try to game them.

Which is probably why the Zon is removing the “like” buttons and “tags” on US buy pages. Every author group I belong to asks people to “like and tag” each other’s book pages whether or not the books are in a genre you read or enjoy. Which means the “likes and tags” no longer have meaning for tracking a person's individual preferences, which was the point in the first place.

Even though nobody can know for sure how the “inscrutable algos” are programmed, Amazon watchers can tell when there’s been a change. Some people make a serious study of them.

With the advent of KDP Select—Amazon’s program for books they have exclusive rights to sell—the algorithms were changed to benefit Select members. Select books get more weight in the popularity lists, more suggestions for “also bought” books, e-mail recommendations, and are featured when somebody searches the genre. That makes sense. When you ask for an exclusive, you need to give perks.

Now there’s an even more privileged “White Glove” program for books that have been “self-published” through a literary agency. It has a longer exclusive period and gets the benefit of even more also-boughts and other promotions.

Nothing wrong with that. It’s Amazon’s store and they can promote what they want. But it does make it harder on the truly self-published and small-press competition.

The “Kindle Revolution” that Amazon sparked in 2009 allowed individual authors to self-publish cheaply and gave them an equal opportunity with big publishing’s authors to get discovered. This was a brilliant way of providing a lot of inexpensive books for their brand new Kindle at a time when most people didn’t even think they needed an ereading device.

It was win/win. Amazon sold Kindles—and individual authors got to enter a marketplace that had been reserved for big corporations for half a century.

In doing that, Amazon shook up the book world and did a service to new authors that was pretty unprecedented.

But since then, Amazon has become a publishing company itself. Their Thomas and Mercer, 47North, Montlake Romance, and other imprints now compete with the Big 5. They also compete with the indies. Guess who the algorithms are likely to favor? (I did mention the elves are smart?)

Meanwhile, Amazon's competition as a retailer continues to grow. Kobo and Apple are gobbling up market share. Like any big business, the Zon wants to dominate the competition and keep its place as Alpha Dog of the online retail business.

So they’ve made it very appealing for authors to sell exclusively through them—both with their KDP Select and White Glove program.

And last month they bought Goodreads. We still have to see how that will affect self-and small-publishers. David Gaughran thinks it’s a boon to authors. But some others, like Jarek Steele, and The Author's Guild —not so much. But Mr. Coker saw a silver lining: a way of thwarting people who try to manipulate the elves with paid reviews. For a nice, balanced overview of the argument, read Porter Anderson's piece in Ether for Authors at Publishing Perspectives.

The one thing people agree on is that Amazon wanted Goodreads' data to feed its algorithms. As Gaughran says “Amazon’s recommendation algorithms will be vastly improved with all the data that Goodreads has been collecting.”

So is it true that the Amazon algorithm elves are no longer friendly to indies? Do they only like you if you publish through them, or have an agent—or at least give them an exclusive?

I think it's clear that multi-platform indies are not in the Zon's A-list any more.  I’m not sure we’ll see as many 100% self-pubbed authors reach the heights that Amanda Hocking and John Locke did in the heady early days of the "Kindle" revolution. But indie books by previously traditionally-published hybrid authors are still breaking records. And agents are still trolling the Amazon bestseller lists.

Indies are also hurt by the Big Six books that are being offered as cheaply as indies. (There have been amazing giveaways of big name author’s books, especially in the UK. And this week I saw Barbara Kingslover's iconic novel The Bean Trees for $1.99)

Some people think this all means that the self-publishing revolution is dying.

But the fact is, the trend to self-publishing and boutique digital press publishing is not only alive and well, but growing.

This is because Big Publishing has done nothing to change their attitude that the publisher/author relationship must be one of master/slave. They have made themselves less attractive to new writers with ever more draconian contracts and demands that authors hire publicists and provide expensive traditional marketing with their own funds while the publisher risks nothing, sometimes offering no advance.

The fact that Amazon aspires to become a big publisher itself may make Amazon less attractive for the truly independent author.

But the door to successful self-publishing has been opened and it’s not going to close. The Zon may no longer be the fairy godperson of indie self-publishers, but it's not the Great Satan, either.

And more important:  it's not the only game in town. Amazon now represents less than 50% of the ebook market.

• A huge number of readers prefer to read on their iPads, which makes the Apple store a big contender.
• 50% of Apple ebook sales are outside of the US, where the Zon is not always revered, due to a habit of tax dodging. 
• Kobo has a growing share of the international market, plus Kobo ereaders are selling in indie bookstores, which gives indie authors a chance to reach readers through old-time word-of-mouth, in-store promoting. 
• The moribund Barnes and Noble/Nook store is undergoing a major overhaul with the new Nook publishing. Those who fear change say it's a disaster, but many in the know say it's much more user friendly and heralds new and forward thinking from Nook, which is still a player in the ereader market. 
• Plucky little Smashwords is expanding all the time. They are the only way for non-US writers to get uploaded to region-specific sites like Barnes and Noble, so they are becoming more and more useful to indies all over the world. 

Self-and small press published authors who want to be on top of the next trend need to spread their marketing to all platforms, instead of spending all their time courting the Amazon algorithms with freebies and/or organizing armies of fellow authors to give likes and tags and fake reviews.

Launching a book in Amazon's Select program still seems to be a good move. (It works for me, anyway) but after the first three to six months I think most writers need to spread out to other platforms and promote there.

What we do not want to do is keep repeating what worked when the algorithms were the BFFs of the indie authorpreneur and the word "Kindle" was synonymous with "ereader".

The  Indie "Kindle" Revolution may be fading, but the Indie Digital Revolution is still in a dynamic and robust infancy.

What about you, scriveners? Have your sales been affected by the changes in algorithms? Have you heard rumors that you need to do certain things to keep on the good side of the Zon elves? Do you miss the "likes" and "tags"? Do you fear the indie revolution is petering out? 

UPDATE: There is now an algorithm that writes poetry. See, I said those elves are smart! The New York Times now has a Tumbr site where they post algorithm-written haikus based on news stories, called Times Haiku. Here's my favorite. (From an article on Margaret Thatcher's legacy.)

But we are British

So most of us stood around

In awkward silence. 

OPPORTUNITY ALERTS:

1) Readwave: A showcase for short stories: ReadWave is a community of readers and writers who love to discover and share new stories from contemporary writers. Readers can access thousands of stories and read them for free on mobile or desktop--and writers can use ReadWave to build up a fanbase and market their stories online. ReadWave has created a new reading widget, that allows bloggers and website owners to embed stories online in a compact form. The ReadWave widget is the first reading widget to allow readers to "follow" the writer. When a reader follows a writer they are added to the writer’s fanbase and can receive updates on all of the writer’s future stories. ReadWave puts writers in touch with the readers that are right for them. This looks like a great innovative site. You know how I've been encouraging you to write more short fiction? This is where to put it to start building a fan base.

2) The Saturday Evening Post’s Second Annual Great American Fiction Contest—yes, THAT Saturday Evening Post is holding a short fiction contest. Could you join the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald; William Faulkner; Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.; Ray Bradbury; Louis L’Amour; Sinclair Lewis; Jack London; and Edgar Allan Poe? $10 entry fee Deadline July 1, 2013

3) Inspirational anthology accepting submissions: A "Chicken Soup for the Soul" author is looking for heartwarming inspirational nonfiction pieces. Do You Have a Story on "Staying Sane in the Chaotic 24/7 World"? If you have a great story and would like to be considered for the anthology, 30 Days to Sanity, Send submissions to: 30 Days to Sanity at Box 31453, Santa Fe, NM 87594-1453. Or e-mail stories to stephanie@30daystosanity.com The maximum word count is 1200 words. For each story selected for the program a permission fee of $100 will be offered for one-time rights. There are no limits on the number of submissions. Deadline is May 1, 2013

4) Stanford Story Slam The first ever Stanford Story Slam has opened, a chance for a team of writers to win $500. Anybody can enter. To enter, you must collaborate to write about this prompt: “There are over 15,000 bikes used by students, staff, and faculty to get around Stanford campus. Over 300 bikes are stolen each year. Where do they go?” The Stanford Arts Review will publish the winning entry. Here’s more from the organizers You don't have to be a Stanford student to enter. Deadline is April 22.

5) The 35th annual Nimrod Literary Contest: The Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry and The Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction. The Awards offer first prizes of $2,000 and publication and second prizes of $1,000 and publication. One of the oldest “little magazines” in the country, Nimrod has continually published new and extraordinary writers since. For more information about Nimrod, visit their website at www.utulsa.edu/nimrod. Deadline is April 30th.

Read More

Indie Publishing in 2013: Why We Can't Party Like It's 2009

Amazon's Kindle turned five years old last week. What an exciting half-decade it's been!

Jeff Bezos showed his genius when he gave his e-reader that name. The device sparked a conflagration that is still pretty much out of control. The old publishing world is in chaos, and nobody has a clue what direction the wildfire will take next.

Although if you want a little glimpse into the crystal ball, Agent Laurie McLean offered some optimistic predictions in her guest post here two weeks ago.

But in just the two weeks since her post, we've seen more wild shifts and changes. HarperCollins, moving to more ebooks, is closing one of its biggest warehouses, and seems set to gobble up Simon and Schuster.  And Simon and Schuster has launched a new scary-scammy self-publishing wing by teaming up with the vanity publisher Author Solutions. Yes, the Author Solutions which was recently acquired by Penguin, which was recently purchased by Random House. And Random House is launching several new digital-only imprints. Ditto HarperCollins' Avon imprint which is actually soliciting your NaNo novels. (Yes. That one surprised the heck out of me, too.)

Confused yet? I sure am. Some people think the Big Six-no-Five-or-is-it-Four—are soon to become the Big One, which still may not be Big enough to compete with what some fear will become the most powerful publishing force of all: the Mighty Zon. (Sarah Lacy at PandoDaily has some interesting things to say on the subject of Amazon's inevitable dominance.)

In five years, Amazon has gone from mail-order bookseller to major player in world publishing.

They did this partly by sparking the "indie revolution".

The "revolution" was another product of Mr. Bezos' marketing genius. He wanted cheap electronic books for his new Kindle, and the Big Six were not about to slash prices for some upstart online retailer with a gadget nobody thought they needed. Publishers wanted to charge the same price for an ebook as they did for a new hardcover book. Amazon accused them of price-fixing and went after them through the legal system.

But meanwhile they needed cheap books for the new Kindle owners.

So they opened up Amazon to self-publishers, offering an author-friendly e-book creation system and a 70% "royalty" to authors who priced their books in the range Amazon wanted to promote: between three and ten dollars.

I'm putting "royalty" in quotes, because, by strict definition, Amazon doesn't pay a traditional royalty. Publishers pay royalties. Retailers take a percentage. For self-publishers, Amazon is a retailer, so technically, Amazon is not paying a 70% royalty; it's taking a 30% sales commission.

But whatever you choose to call it, the payment system worked. Big time. While the Big Six were shrinking advances, lists and print runs—and making increasingly unreasonable demands on authors—the Zon offered writers a new way to distribute their work and actually make money at it.

I first became aware of the viability of Amazon-aided self-publishing in late 2009, when a fellow chick lit author, Elisa Lorello, self-published a novel that went to the top of the Kindle bestseller list on Christmas Day. This was when traditional publishers were treating chick lit as toxic waste and refused to acquire any titles that didn't involve vampires, werepersons, or other dentally-enhanced people-eaters.

I paid even more attention a few months later when Amazon offered Lorello a nice contract with their first publishing venture, Amazon Encore.

Elisa became one of thousands of highly successful e-book self-publishers. In 2010, Amazon's new "indies" like John Locke and Amanda Hocking became household names. At the same time, established, agented novelists like Joe Konrath and Dean Wesley Smith self-published and started to preach the gospel of the "indie" movement.

Then, on March 21, 2011, New York Times bestseller Barry Eisler turned down a six figure advance from St. Martin's  to self-publish his new thriller.

That was the moment when even the nay-sayers had to accept that self-publishing had become mainstream.

Indies went on to become some of the greatest bestsellers of all time, like E. L. James (although, like me, she started with a small press, not strictly self-publishing.) Other self-pubbers made high-profile deals with Hollywood, like Hugh Howey, who sold his Wool books to Ridley Scott for some serious bucks. (Sorry, Hugh, that I tried to give Wool to Speilberg in an earlier version of this post. LOL.)

Subsequently, a whole industry of editors, designers, coders and online advertisers sprang up to minister to the needs of the new indie entrepreneur-authors.

John Locke wrote a book telling how to achieve Amazon success like his. Literally millions of self-publishers flooded the marketplace in 2011 and 2012. (Nobody's quite sure how many ebooks there are, since many don't have ISBNs.)

But a few months ago, things began to change. Amazon made some policy changes that were decidedly less friendly to self-publishers.

Indies who formerly sang Amazon's praises began to get cranky. I recently saw this lament on the Kindleboards (with apologies to Tennessee Ernie Ford.)

You write sixteen books, what do you get

Another year older and deeper in debt

Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go

I owe my soul to the Amazon store.

Some authors even think indies are being "being quietly herded off into a corner" since the DoJ decision brought down the price of Big Six books. Stephen Hise wrote a dark post at Indies Unlimited on the effects of Amazon's policy changes on the indie author.

What we do know is that Amazon's attempt to bring down prices through the legal system finally paid off. Big name ebooks by Big Six authors are now selling for reasonable, and even give-away prices.

So indies aren't as necessary to the Amazon bottom line as they once were. I'm not sure things are as dire as Derek Haines says in his post in The Vandal, because established indies report they continue to have good Amazon sales. But he has some legitimate worries.

For the new author who is thinking of launching a career by self-publishing through Amazon, it's important to be aware things have changed drastically in recent months. One thing to be aware of—especially if you're a newbie—is that a lot of the most powerful marketing strategies of the "Kindle Millionaires" are no longer viable:

#1 Garnering lots of of Amazon reviews: A great deal of John Locke's success was due to his huge number of positive Amazon reviews. His "how I made millions" book claimed this was due to his expertise in targeting the right reader.

But it turns out his expertise was actually in buying fake reviews.

The paid review and sock-puppet review scandals that rocked Amazon this summer after revelations by Locke--and an embarrassing number of others--have resulted in a draconian crackdown on all Amazon reviews.

The L.A. Times reports that many authors have found their reviews disappearing. Some popular legitimate reviewers have had all their reviews (of indies and trad-pubbed books alike) deleted with no explanation. I've seen lots of reports from authors who have lost dozens of reviews for no apparent reason. And authors who question the arbitrary removals are told they'll be banned from selling on Amazon forever if they dare to question any action by the Great Zon. Even Amazon advocate Joe Konrath thinks they've gone over to the dark side with this.

Amazon now bans authors from reviewing other authors' books in their own genre. They claim this is because their TOS guidelines ban reviewing by a "competitor," and this protects against attacks on rivals by sock puppets. But they delete positive and negative reviews alike. And not only from authors in their own genre. Some people have been told all published authors have been banned from reviewing. (If the New York Times or the New Yorker did this, they'd have to go out of business. Authors have ALWAYS reviewed other authors.)

They are also deleting reviews by anybody with a name similar to the author. I've had reviews deleted from anybody named "Allen". The rational is that anybody with the same name has a financial interest in my work. (Yes, Woody Allen, Joan Allen, and General John Allen have a big financial interest in my books :-) )

As you can imagine, this has made many reviewers wary of posting anything to Amazon, and has left readers jaded and untrusting. Seeking reviews is now a much less sure-fire way of making sales. Unfortunately, search engines still favor books with more reviews. Not a good situation for a newbie self-publisher.

2) Using free ebooks to raise your Amazon profile. Elisa Lorello had her big Christmas 2009 success because she offered her book free on Amazon that day. That pushed her to the top of the "bestseller" list and raised her book from obscurity to the top of suggested "also boughts" and "top sellers" that appear on every Kindle.

But in late 2011, Amazon introduced KDP Select. Only authors enrolled in the "Select" program are now allowed freebie give-aways. Select requires exclusivity. If you sell ebooks at Barnes and Noble, iTunes, Smashwords, Kobo, etc—or even on your own website—you aren't allowed to list a book as "free" on Amazon.

And the "also boughts" and "top sellers" also heavily favor books in the KDP Select program.

Until recently, Amazon matched the price you charge for your book on other platforms, so it was possible to get around the KDP Select exclusivity by making your book free on Smashwords, but many of us are finding that even after several months, Amazon doesn't seem to be matching a "free" price.

They are however, sweetening the pot for KDP Select members by doubling the price they pay for "borrows" (Select books are also free to borrow for Amazon Prime members.) Now many Select books will get more than the sale price for a borrow. It's tempting, but only if you have other books available at other retailers. I think it's unwise for anybody to be 100% dependent on the whims of Amazon's ever-changing algorithms.

3) Selling mass quantities of 99 cent ebooks to become a bestseller on Amazon. A year ago, D.D. Scott, the force of nature behind the Writers Guide to E-Publishing, preached the gospel of "Snickers-bar marketing" and the 99 cent ebook.

But that has all changed. Here's what she said last week,

"Up until a few months ago, using the 99 Cent Price Point got you a ton of fabulous VISIBILITY ….You could more than make up for a higher royalty per book (using a price point of $2.99 or above) because of the higher quantity of books sold at the lower 99 Cent price.

BUT…not anymore!!!

Due to the agency pricing/cost-fixing schemes and the resulting Department of Justice settlement with a few of The Big Six Publishers – with several more holding out for litigation, many Big Six/TradiPubs are lowering their prices to between 99 Cents and $3.99.

Also…and this is HUGE…Amazon’s algorithms have definitely changed to favor the TradiPub books at these lower prices."

There was also a change in the Amazon algorithms last May that give a 99 cent book sale less "weight" in sales rankings. To be counted as a full "sale" a book has to sell for $2.99 or more.

4)  Getting featured on Kindle Nation Daily, E-Reader News Today, Pixel of Ink or other sites for e-book readers. Recently the big sites for ebook promos announced they will be severely restricting the number of free books they list, due to a firm request from Amazon. Here's how they put it at ENT.

"While Amazon cannot "make" us do anything with our website, they can tell us they will not pay us anymore if we don't do what they want us to do.  And what they've told us to do is cut down A LOT on the free books or they will not pay us at all.  I can't go into detail on what they've told us but this is something that will be affecting all sites similar to ours within the next month."

5) Promoting your work on Facebook. Facebook is still "free" for family and friends, but now you have to pay to use it for marketing. Meghan Ward talked in her post this week about "Promoted Posts", which Facebook launched in May of this year.

"For $5 $10, or $15, Facebook will make your post more visible within your followers’ news feeds. If you don’t promote your post, only a fraction of your followers will ever see it." 

Facebook's changes mean that only about 16% of all your followers now see your regular posts. If you want more people to see them, you have to pay around $50. Even for family photos and LOL Cat videos.

~ ~ ~

So does all this mean the indie movement is over?

Not at all. Simon and Schuster wouldn't be making their clueless foray into self-publishing if they thought indie publishing was going to diminish.  

But I think it's important not to think of it as the "Kindle" movement any more. I think the "revolution" needs to wean itself from the Mighty Zon and Facebook to be truly "indie".

The truth is, "indie" is a misnomer for someone who is 100% dependent on a mega-corporation. Yes, when you publish on Amazon you're an "independent contractor" rather than an employee, but that isn't necessarily a ticket to financial independence.

I think the indies of the future will need to focus on smaller outlets like Smashwords, Kobo and Barnes and Noble, even though they may require more initial work.

Smashwords may be a little cumbersome, but it is a truly "independent" company. Mark Coker started it because he's an indie author himself, and I think right now he still only has about thirteen employees. It's still a very "indie" operation.

And a number of indies are finding Smashwords is their best source of revenue. Horror author Edward M. Grant said on the Passive Voice blog this week,

"I’ve sold about 4x as many e-books through Smashwords and its distributors as through Amazon in the last three months, and made more money on most of the sales."

If you want to support independent publishing, look for ebook titles to buy at Smashwords before clicking automatically to Amazon. You can buy a book there for your Kindle, Nook, Kobo, iPad or any other device just as easily as with Amazon. And there are a whole lot of great books free. (Shameless plug: My comic mystery SHERWOOD, LTD is free on Smashwords.) Leaving your reviews on Smashwords instead of Amazon may also have a greater impact. Certainly your review will have a better chance of a long shelf-life.

Kobo is another very author-friendly retailer that's just beginning to hit its stride. They're the biggest online book retailer in Canada, where they started, and now they've been acquired by e-commerce giant, Rakuten, they're getting a good chunk of the global market.

British indie superstar Saffina Desforges says Kobo is blitzing the airwaves with adverts for their mini ereaders, which are "cute and back lit--with a very attractive price tag of 40 quid."

Kobo reps tell me they plan to start forums and discussion groups to rival the Kindleboards. Let's hope they'll be monitored by polite Canadians so we can leave the crankypants Kindleboarders behind to snipe at each other in the Amazon jungle.

Let me be clear: I'm not telling indies to abandon Amazon. It still has 43% of the ebook market--which may go up again with the phenomenal success of the new Kindle Fire tablet.

And I think KDP Select is great for launching a book, but I suggest using it for the minimum of three months. Do your freebies and get your title and name out there. But then I think it's best to opt out and spread your book to as many platforms as possible.

Amazon's shift to favoring the traditional publishers may mean fewer "Kindle Millionaires," but I have no doubt there will be new Indie E-Book Millionaires.

For the new writers out there who are on the fence about self-publishing, my advice is to keep your options open. Don't make your decision based on old news. The new digital imprints and unagented submissions at Random House and HarperCollins could be game-changers. (They are offering real publishing contracts: the opposite of Simon and Schuster's vanity publishing imprint.)

And don’t forget there are wonderful small digital publishers like mine who pay great royalties and take all the financial risk by providing cover design, editing, formatting and even some marketing. A niche publisher that carries only your genre and targets your market can be a very good choice for a newbie writer who is not an expert in business or marketing. (Just make sure the publisher is legit and check them out with Writer Beware. If you have to pay up front or sign away any rights, you don't want to go there.)

Because now more than ever, indies will have to become market-savvy entrepreneurs. Here's advice from Kristen McLean at Tools of Change for Publishing.

"In order to be well-equipped for this new environment, we think authors and content creators need as much training in business and publishing expertise as they do in writing. They need to understand deep structural issues like the way data flows around the industry, new modes of discovery, new thinking about consumer behavior, how to read the numbers, the potential of new technology, and how to build an effective team around themselves so they can run their businesses."

One way for authors to keep up with publishing business news is to follow Jane Friedman, who has launched a new link list today of Best Business Advice for Writers.

Whether or not Amazon is "dumping" the indies, it's time to rethink the rules that have been working for self- and small publishers for the past four years. We all need to plan innovative marketing strategies that involve smaller, more indie-friendly companies.

You don't want to find you've escaped the oppression of the Big Six only to be squashed by the Big Zon.

Book News: Anne's new Camilla Randall mystery, NO PLACE LIKE HOME will be launching next week. It's set in San Luis Obispo, "the happiest town on earth" and explores how close we all are to homelessness. (I'm totally in love with this cover by Laura Morrigan.)

Also, we'll be having some exciting give-aways of ebooks AND paper books for HOW TO BE A WRITER IN THE E-AGE...AND KEEP YOUR E-SANITY on this blog and Catherine Ryan Hyde's next week. Stop by for a chance to win free books!

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