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Overpaying High-Flying Indie Authors Fails; What Will Those Silly Major Publishers Try Next?
Michael Levin
NYT Bestselling Author, Amazon Kindle #1 Business Book Author; CEO, BusinessGhost.com
Posted: 11/14/2013 3:56 pm
"Where's my Fifty Shades of Gray?"
You could hear disgruntled publishers pounding their desks from one side of Manhattan to the other. They all recognized, even though they didn't want to put it in words, that their ability to identify the next hot book had withered. Little that they published was selling well. So they had to have a new strategy to find something to bring to market.
That strategy amounted to overpaying radically for books from self-published authors who managed to sell 20,000 to 40,000 copies. The thinking along Publisher's Row was this: If these rank amateurs could sell so many copies without us, think of how many copies they could sell with us!
Unfortunately, there were a few flaws with this not-so-brilliant strategy.
The first is that publishers have forgotten how to market books.
Or rather, they have never really adjusted effectively to the world they used to control. A Simon and Schuster or Random House would take out large ads in newspaper book review sections, with a tacit understanding that all of their books would get read and many would be reviewed favorably.
Since newspapers aren't publishing too many book reviews these days, and since fewer and fewer people are actually reading newspapers, that strategy stopped working during the Clinton administration.
Then there was always co-op advertising, a fancier way of saying payola, in which publishers paid bookstores to put specific books in the window, on the front tables or even on bookshelves with the face of the book and not the spine facing out.
Amazon put paid to browsing, so that was the end of that.
In short, publishers had gotten so fat and lazy doing those same simple things over and over that they had completely forgotten how to innovate in their marketing.
As a result, today, the major publishers are doing practically no meaningful book marketing.
So why exactly did publishers figure that if a motivated, self-publishing author could sell X number of copies, at a lower price point, mind you, that a major publisher could come in and sell even more copies at a higher price?
And all that without marketing the book?
So for the past year or so, publishers hoping to catch lightning in a bottle have bestowed mid-six-figure advances on authors who combined writing a manuscript with a lot of social media self-help in order to generate sales. Few of those books will actually earn out their advances. The strategy, therefore, is all but dead.
There's another way to describe a book-selling strategy that hinges on overpaying unproven authors in the hope that their books, whatever they are, will turn into the next Fifty Shades.
It's called playing the Powerball, and there are very few businesses that succeed with a model based on buying lottery tickets.
So what are publishers going to do next?
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