IN part two of our series on ebooks and ereaders in Ireland we look at Apple and Easons.

Apple

Personally I’ve never rated Apple’s commitment to books as a category and not just because their recently deceased founder dismissed reading as something people didn’t do any more. More importantly for me ebooks never seemed to have Apple’s wholehearted support, iBooks was originally an optional download on new iOS devices rather than a native app/. But I’m beginning to warm to them.

Firstly they are the only ebook international retailer with a dedicated Irish ebook store. Through their iBookstore I can now see what Irish people are buying, at least what they are buying through Apple. Secondly they have a growing collection of enhanced ebooks that offers more than just reading for those easily bored, Finally they are keenly priced beating Amazon by a few cent on many of the bestselling titles.

Where iBooks falls down is its lack of support for computer reading. Unlike Kindle which facilitates both computer reading AND web reading, Apple does neither, a big let down in their ecosystem. ON the plus side, Apple does use the ePub standard with DRM and so

Device Types: The iOS range is huige and includes iPod’s, iPhones and iPads.

Device Pricing: Basic iOS devices begin at €199 for the iPod Touch and range all the way up to the iPad 2 3G 64GB at €799.

Ebook Pricing: Like Amazon Apple offers a huge selection of free ebooks, both classics and mainstream. Bestsellers trending towards 60-80% of print price especially from big six publishers. Some specialist titles have either parity or more expensive ebook editions. Irish publishers are leaking into the iBookstore slowly but surely.

IPN Rating: 4/5 (Loses 1.5 for lack of computer and web reading, gains .5 for Euro Pricing)

Easons

Unlike both Apple and Amazon, Easons is not a platform, in fact it is only a reseller, in that way it’s offering is more like that of a traditional bookseller.

For all that they have a number of positives in their corner. For one they offer a range of devices and use epub and their supplier of epub files is Overdrive which has a massive catalogue.

Another positive for Easons is that they seem keen to expand into ebooks as rapidly as possible, devoting lots of store space to devices and even offering ebooks prominently on their website. It’s also got a trusted name in Irish homes so I;d never rule out a successful effort on Easons behalf to gain a chunk of the market.

They also facilitate download to computers and reading of ebooks on the Adobe Digital Editions application.

Device Types: Easons offers numerous devices from the cheap and cheerful Elonex to the very attractive Sony Reader

Device Pricing: IN truth Easons has the keenest pricing starting at less than €100 and ranging only up to €250.

Ebook Pricing: The range at Easons is good, but not as vast as at Apple and certainly nowhere near as huge as at Amazon. Pricing is also hampered and ebooks are close to print prices in many cases and sometimes higher though to be fair this is a common problem across ebook retailers and is the fault of the publishers not one just associated with Easons.

IPN Rating: 3.5/5 Easons loses 1 for a poor selection, 1 for poor pricing but gains .5 back for Euro pricing.

Friday will see the final part of these series, tackling, Kobo and everyone else.

The rise of Interest in Kindle over the last year. Note the spike, now surpassed, from last Christmas

2011 has seen an upsurge in interest in ebooks and ereaders in Ireland. IPN started to notice a huge spike in search traffic for Kindle’s, ebooks and a number of other devices in November. In an effort to help people make decisions in the run in to what looks to be the biggest ebook Christmas in Ireland so far we decided to write about ebooks and e-readers in Ireland, where to get them, how to use them and everything else. If the piece doesn’t answer your questions, comment below and we’ll respond asap.

The Basics
The best place to start is to set down some glossary terms that people should have a grasp of when it comes to ebooks.

The first of these is the difference between ebooks and ereaders. Ereaders are the devices one reads on: Kobo, Kindle, Sony eReader, iPad, iPhone and any of the myriad other devices one can read a book on in digital form. The ebooks are the actual digital books themselves.

There are two basic ebook formats azw (Amazon’s Kindle format) and epub (many other outlets).  There are several others, but these two are  the ones you will most likely encounter. If you need more information about formats, Wikipedia has a good summary here.

Irish customers can buy ebooks in either format. What’s more for epubs, Irish customers have a considerable choice in who they buy their epub ebooks from and in the type of ereaders they use to read them on.

Most dedicated ereaders have an Eink screen. Eink screens only use power when they change page or perform some other action. They use small electrical charges to change the orientation of white or dark pigments contained within tiny capsules. Between them, the white and the dark capsules spell out the words on the screen.

These screens come very close to replicating the visual landscape of a paper page in a paper book. Combined with the form factor for most readers and their weight this makes them akin to holding either a medium-sized paperback book or a small hardback, and often even lighter.

Devices that are not dedicated to ebooks, like Apple’s iOS devices, the Kindle Fire, the new Nook Tablet and the new Kobo Vox tend to use backlit screens which some people like and others don’t. They are also multi-functional devices with many uses.

Some devices have slick end-to-end platforms in place to sell you ebooks for your device. Examples of these platforms include Amazon, Apple and Kobo.

Ebooks attract a 21% (soon to be 23%) VAT rate a complication that presents problems across the EU (for more on the VAT issues on ebooks in Ireland, read this post on VAT and ebooks by Zoe Faulder).

The Platforms
This section will cover in detail may of the platforms Irish people can buy ebooks on. This post covers Amazon’s Kindle and the post on Wednesday will deal in-depth with other platforms like Apple, Kobo and Easons.

Amazon

Perhaps because Amazon have been the game changer in the ereader and ebook space, there is a tendancy to refer to all ereaders as Kindles, but in truth only Amazon ereaders are called Kindles. Amazon recently launched a Kindle Tablet, the Kindle Fire, with a  full colour screen and access to content other than books. This device is not yet available to Irish customers. PC World, Curry’s and Tesco are selling the basic Kindle and a 3G version. Otherwise the device should be bought from the Amazon.com site.

Irish customers must buy Kindle ebooks from the Amazon.com site too*. This wrinkle means that although there are now four Euro denominated Kindle stores (Spain, Italy, Germany and France) Irish buyers purchase their ebooks in Dollars and with a slight price disadvantage.

Despite that however, Kindle is a comprehensive platform with significant features. It offers cross-platform, and device, syncing, samples, wi-fi and 3G downloads, a social network for Kindle users, and a new Cloud Reader that allows a user to read a book online. They also compete heavily on price and encourage lower pricing. Finally it has an impressive (probably the best) selection of titles.

Device Types: The Kindle range is increasingly diverse,  starting with the basic option which features neither a keyboard nor touch capabilities. The mid-range options include a touch based pair and another featuring a keyboard. The new Fire tablet breaks quite dramatically with the existing form factor. Not all options can be purchased in Ireland through Amazon.com and retail stores. Most stores will only offer the basic version and the Kindle Keyboard 3G.
Device Pricing: Basic, non-touch device €109-115 in store or around €125 via Amazon.com. 3G device with keyboard €179-195 in stores like PC World, Tesco and Currys and around 220 via Amazon.com (Amazon price includes shipping, taxes etc.).
Ebook Pricing: Huge selection of free ebooks, both classics and self published titles. Many mainstream-published titles from 2l.99 to 9.99 especially from second-tier publishing houses (ie not the big six publishers). Bestsellers trending towards 60-80% of print price especially from big six publishers. Some specialist titles have either parity or more expensive ebook editions. Irish publishers are well represented in the Kindle store.

Other:
One of the major reasons why Kindle has prospered has been its Kindle Direct Platform, a way for writers and publishers to self publishers their content directly to Kindle and most importantly to sell it. Buying ebooks through Amazon.com is a bit irritating especially as the pricing is in Dollars. Even so the selection is huge and well priced (mostly). You can complain about Amazon for many other things but their platform is easy to use, filled with good books and makes sense for most readers.

IPN Rating: 4.5/5 (loses .5 for the Dollar pricing)

*Of course assuming you follow the correct set-up and don’t a UK address and a UK credit Card which allows you to open an Amazon.co.uk account.

David Gaughran talks about Crowdsourcing his latest self-published novel, A Storm Hits Valparaíso , through the recently created Irish website, Fund It.

Self-publishers have lots of advantages over the traditional route: we are quick to market, we can price very competitively and still turn a profit, we can write (and publish) whatever we like, we earn up to 70% royalties on our work (more if we sell direct), and we control every aspect of how our books are presented to the reading public.

One of the obvious downsides is that we have to pay for things like editing and cover design, and if you are committed to a professional approach, you will have to shift several hundred copies before you break even for all those out-of-pocket expenses, let alone recoup anything for all of your own time invested in writing, publishing, and promoting each title.

When I first heard about the US crowdfunding site Kickstarter, I was intrigued. Here were a bunch of artists, filmmakers, and writers who were leveraging the power of the internet to fund their creative projects. In return for their support, funders received rewards based on their level of contribution (from a copy of the book or movie to magazine subscriptions, special editions, unique artwork, or an invitation to the premiere).

Self-publishers have used Kickstarter to cover editing costs, pay for hardcover print runs, commission cover art, release limited editions, and create audiobooks.

Rather than a begging bowl being passed around, the rewards can be quite tantalizing, representing a bargain for those pledging. While some projects are unsuccessful in hitting their targets (and those who pledged are never charged), the slickest presentations with the most creative rewards are often oversubscribed, sometimes hugely. The only problem, for me, was that Kickstarter was only open to US artists.

Last month, I came across an Irish crowdfunding site called Fund It – an initiative created by the Temple Bar-based non-profit Business to Arts, and supported by the Department of Arts, Heritage & The Gaeltacht and British Council Ireland.

Using Fund It, successful projects have included poetry performances organized by a small press, an interactive storytelling map of Dublin for locals and tourists, a year’s print run for a student literary magazine, and soon, hopefully, my project.

Essentially, I’m using Fund It to take advance orders for digital and print copies of a novel that will be published in December. If successful, this will allow me to turn a profit before the book is even released.

This project was on a relatively small-scale, but I can see so much potential here. In the future, as my audience grows, I could use Fund It to pay for an offset print run or a limited edition hardback.

Aside from the rewards they receive, crowdfunding allows readers to feel like they are a part of the publication process – helping a book come into being – and they will see their name in the Acknowledgements too.

Book marketing, these days, is all about connections. Self-publishers (and small presses) can’t compete with the wall-to-wall promo that accompanies a blockbuster novel from a big-name writer. What we have to do is seek out those passionate readers who will champion our books to others – generating that ever-elusive word of mouth.

And what better way to get that conversation started than including your readers in the very act of creation?

____

David Gaughran is the author of If You Go Into The Woods, Transfection, and Let’s Get Digital: How To Self-Publish, And Why You Should. You can catch him at http://davidgaughran.wordpress.com

Last week a new science-fiction and fantasy title, A Dance With Dragons, sold 2,200 copies in hardback in Ireland. What’s more, it did so at over €20 per copy. An impressive result and a great boost for the booksellers who sold it.

In countries like the US and the UK though the same book sold huge numbers of hardback copies AND huge numbers of ebook editions, 170,000 print copies and 110,000 e-book copies¹ on its first day of sales alone in the US according to its US Publisher, Random House. In the UK, the Bookseller reports that, ‘HarperCollins sold more than 10,000 e-books’ and ‘ 28,840 copies last week in bookshops.’²

You would imagine that with a perfect opportunity to increase the visibility of ebooks in Ireland and with a clear market for the ebook version, Irish booksellers would have been keen to exploit the interest. You’d be wrong. No Irish bookseller sold a single copy of the book in digital form.

[pullquote]In percentage terms those UK & US number are very impressive too, 28.9% for the US and 25.6% for the UK. If those figures were translated into Ireland you might imagine ebooks accounting for some 440 units³.[/pullquote]

In percentage terms those UK & US number are very impressive too, 28.9% for the US and 25.6% for the UK. If those figures were translated into Ireland you might imagine ebooks accounting for some 440 units³.

The truth is that Irish ebook sales are nowhere near that level, we’d be lucky if they were 5%. That’s less than 100 units sold in digital format. The point is that for a title where ebooks are a clearly important part of the sales mix, Irish readers, if they want to buy an ebook version, MUST purchase that ebook from a foreign retailer. Not one Irish bookseller was selling the ebook edition as of this morning.

Even allowing for a lower ebook price point (around €12-€15 for A Dance With Dragons) and even allowing for the much lower ebook market share in Ireland, Irish booksellers are allowing foreign retailers to suck up their market and potentially capture their ebook sales in the future too. Imagine if just one retailer HAD sold the ebook to Irish readers and promoted it to Irish digital readers. Even if it had only been 50 sales they could have increased their revenue by €500 or €600. Who, in this day and age, can sniff at that?

[pullquote]Easons, to its credit, has at least made an effort with ebooks. Its store offers 60% of the titles in the top ten last week, but not the bestseller.[/pullquote]

Easons, to its credit, has at least made an effort with ebooks. Its store offers 60% of the titles in the top ten last week, but not the bestseller. The ebook listings pages on the site are attractive and the prices not outrageous. However the company does not seem to be pushing ebooks with any degree of enthusiasm.

As for the independents, ebooks seem to not exist for them. Of course they might reply what CAN we do? You might start by looking at what Readings, a small independent chain in Australia, is doing on the book.ish platform.

[pullquote]As for the independents, ebooks seem to not exist for them. Of course they might reply what CAN we do? You might start by looking at whatReadings, a small independent chain in Australia, is doing on the booki.sh platform.[/pullquote]

Options do exist. Kobo Books has already called for partners to help it expand internationally. Barnes & Noble, although they have not spoken publicly about their desire to expand the Nook’s reach, must be thinking about how to reach foreign markets. Even Google offers a potential partnership with its ebook service (which was just revealed as the partner for JK Rowling’s Pottermore site).

It seems to me that the key is combining content, a reasonably priced device and a real commitment to digital publishing rather than just lip-service. That strategy has worked for Barnes & Noble when they realized the future was digital and it previously worked for Amazon.

As ebooks grow in Ireland, as they surely will, booksellers failure to embrace ebooks actively will result in more and more digital sales leaking from the Irish market towards UK and US retailers who actually do sell the ebooks people want. Once they start buying ebooks from foreign stores they are unlikely return to Irish retailers for them. If Irish booksellers don’t look for a way to get involved in ebook sales and quickly, they will lose physical sales and not even have a hope of replacing them. That would be bad for them, bad for readers who value Irish bookstores and bad for literary culture in Ireland.

~~~~
Notes
1 | http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/14/books/george-r-r-martins-dance-with-dragons-sells-well.html
2 | http://www.thebookseller.com/news/hc-hits-digital-martin-milestone.html
3 | Based on a 25% market share of 2200.

A Fascinating piece by Alexander McNabb looking at the implications of Amazon’s acquisition of The Book Depository for Egypt.

Amazon.com’s decision to acquire Guernsey-based online book distribution company, The Book Depository, was announced in a terse press release from the online retailing giant. The move is subject to British regulatory approval, but it would see a small online retailer gobbled up by the behemoth. Many people have seen it as a sort of David/Goliath thing.

Interestingly, the man behind The Book Depository, Andrew Crawford, has done it before – he was part of the startup team at bookpages.co.uk which was acquired by Amazon way back in 1998.

Even more interestingly, there’s a Middle East angle to the acquisition – The Book Depository is the majority holder of an Egpytian business process outsourcing company, elkotob.com, which provides back-end solutions for online book sellers but which also has expressed an aim to “to lead the Arabic book market, in the Middle East region as well as becoming the biggest Arabic books supplier in the world.”

Will the move bring Amazon, finally, to support readers in the Middle East with Kindles and content? Will we now be able to access amazon with Middle East addreses and accounts? Will Amazon start to support Arabic in a big way? Will Amazon’s e-commerce engines replace elkotobs? Will the 65 staff be expanded or replaced by Amazon? Will this see Amazon outsourcing some of its own massive development and server infrastructure to Egypt?

This could be an interesting move indeed…

Adrian White, bookseller and author, discusses why he’s pricing his novel at $9.99 in digital form.

Pricing my ebook at $9.99? Am I crazy? Maybe so, but here’s why:
I have three novels published as ebooks. Two have been published previously by Penguin Books but the third is published exclusively as an ebook. When I came to set the prices, I took the opportunity to try out the three different price points of €2.99, $4.99 and $9.99. I’m well aware of the power of $0.99 as an attention-grabbing price, particularly on Amazon, but it seems to me that a lot of that attention is on established writers such as Stephen Leather – writers making the most of an extensive backlist and an established readership to storm the Amazon sales chart. Or writers of serial genre novels, paranormal romance etc. And good luck to Stephen Leather and the others who manage to pull this off but, although my paperbacks have sold reasonably well in Ireland, I don’t believe I possess the reach to do the same. Also, there’s something in me that says this is my work and if I don’t value it correctly then who will?

Harry Potter and the Half-Price Book
I’ve worked extensively as a bookseller over the years and no other industry manages to devalue the potential of their bestselling product quite like the book industry. Dan Brown, Harry Potter, Stieg Larsson- booksellers can’t wait to give away margin and to price premium-selling product as low as they possibly can. Sure, they point to the price in Tesco or on Amazon and there’s wailing and gnashing of teeth but boo-hoo, I think. Any sales matching that low price represent a complete waste of time, effort and expense when it comes to making money for the retailer. And don’t talk to me about loss-leaders – if you need to half-price Harry Potter to get customers into your shop, perhaps it’s time you took a long hard look at who you are as a bookseller and what you’re trying to do. Those customers won’t stay with you once something cheaper comes along whereas your real customers, the customers that you should value and that will value you in return, well, maybe they’d pay a little extra for Harry Potter because shopping in a proper book store makes them feel good about themselves. Half-price Harry Potter books are not your business; your customers are. The fact that millions of ebooks are being bought for $0.99 doesn’t necessarily mean those ebooks are being read; some customers are buying them simply because they can, now, at that price. And, if these ebooks are not being read, there’s ultimately no future in this market model.

The sweet spot
It seems to me, as pointed out by Catherine Ryan Howard and others, that the sweet price for a novel published as an ebook is currently $2.99; sweet as in a decent return for the author, a cheap offer for the customer and not demeaning to the work. It’s obvious that customers are prepared to pay a higher price for works of non-fiction because they place a higher value on the information containd inside. The fiction e-publishing industry is still in its relative infancy as regards persuading a whole new potential market to switch from paper, or at least to get over the hurdle of reading on a screen, so a low price point makes sense. Is there a danger this will affect future price expectations? Yes. Is the print publishing industry all-at-sea in their approach to pricing, author royalty and distribution of ebooks? Yes. Will things change quickly over the next year or so? Most definitely yes, but the beauty of ebook publishing for an author is that we can adapt and respond – we can roll with the changes.

Going for a song
$0.99 is the price you can expect to pay for a single song on iTunes (although in true Apple fashion this isn’t always the case). So which is worth more – a novel or a song? Depends on the novel and depends on the song, I hear you say. A song can be written in an afternoon and yet last a lifetime – if you’re Lennon and McCartney – and a novel might take a lifetime to write and still be better off left unpublished. I priced my first novel, An Accident Waiting to Happen, at $4.99 because readers have told me it’s a strong story that they couldn’t put down, that they had to find out what happened in the end. (On Smashwords, readers can sample a substantial portion of my books for free so I’m hoping this is true.) Where the Rain Gets In, my second novel, is a harder sell in that it deals extensively with self-harm and so wouldn’t be to everybody’s taste; I priced this at $2.99. But when it comes to my third novel, Dancing to the End of Love, there’s just no way I can bring myself to give it away for a song. I value it too highly; it’s worth more to me than that.

Okay, I lied
Okay, I lied. I’ve been giving Dancing to the End of Love away for free for a limited time period because I want to get readers reviewing the book online. I also gave Accident away for free as part of Read an E-Book Week, my reasoning being that if I could hook a few readers with that book then they might move on to the other two. I believe in the power of free but it’s a marketing tool and not necessarily a sales tool. When it comes to sales and using price to help create those sales, I’m going to use my common sense and price my first two books at $2.99 from the end of this month. I also think my books are ready-made to run a 3 for 2 offer, perhaps with the added twist of giving the most expensive book away for free. Or I might even run a Buy One Get One Free. But I’m going to keep the price of Dancing to the End of Love at $9.99.

Why my work is worth more than two pints of Guinness
I like drinking Guinness. When I’ve drunk one pint of Guinness I like to drink another and two pints of Guinness cost about the same as Dancing to the End of Love. So too does a single fancy cocktail but my work is not some Cosmopolitan or a Mojito – it’s sweet on the tongue but full of body, beautiful to look at and even nicer to savour. My work – like Guinness – is the product of a long gestation period, brewed to a careful recipe and presented with loving care. But here’s the thing: although I can remember certain pints of Guinness at certain periods in my life – and there have been many, many beautiful and memorable pints – my work will last longer than any pint of Guinness. And I’m prepared to back this up by holding my nerve to price my novel – under price my novel – at $9.99.

Irish Publishing News travelled to Earl’s Court in London for the first day of the London Book Fair on Monday. The trip was enjoyable and the fair itself pretty packed, a relief I imagine for the Fair after last year’s poor Ash Cloud impacted attendances.

EoinPurcell@LBF2011

The Irish at the fair seemed busy with representatives from a large number of Publishing Ireland’s members in attendance, notably Maverick House, Mercier Press, O’Brien Press, Blackhall Publishing, Little Island, Liberties Press, The Stinging Fly and Adam’s Cloud.

Catherine Ryan Howard tells us all about her experience of self-printing Mousetrapped.

~~~

Last September I wrote my first “Big Reveal” post and shared with you exactly how many copies I’d sold of my self-published book Mousetrapped, and how much money I was making off those sales. I promised an update a year on, and here it is. Apologies for the extremely long blog post – I’ve used headings as much as possible so you can skip to the bits you’re interested in!

(And yes, this was posted at 0:01. Not my usual blog posting time but by request of a blog reader who’s getting on a plane for 20 hours and couldn’t take the suspense. Plus it means I can lie in tomorrow…)

Then and Now
When I did my first “Big Reveal,” Mousetrapped had been on sale for six months, and I’d sold the grand total of 531 copies, 65% of which were e-book editions. This was good news for me, because my goal for that period had been 500. Still I’d just about made it, and wasn’t sure I was on track to meet my goal of selling 1,000 copies in the first twelve months.

Today Mousetrapped has been on sale for a year, and I’ve sold 3,969 copies of it in total. 88% of them were e-book editions, and about 65% of all sales have taken place since Christmas Eve.

Medium-to-Big Fish in a Tiny Pond
Lucky for me I’m a medium-to-big sized fish in a tiny pond, and these numbers have made headlines. (Well one headline, but still!) Were I in the States – or even the UK – and playing with the Big Boys (Hocking, Konrath, Leather, etc.), I wouldn’t even get a look in. Those guys are selling in a weekend what I’ve sold in a year, and if you’ve been within spitting distance of the internet in the last week you’ll already know that Hocking has just signed a deal a two million dollar deal with St. Martin’s Press.

But here’s the thing: there’s only one author in the world right now who has made two million dollars from self-published e-book sales and another two million dollars on a newly-inked traditional deal. But there are thousands of people like me who, while they pursue their “real” writing dreams of, say, a three-book deal (or two – I’m not picky!), are using self-publishing to earn a living as a writer and improve the chances of their real writerly dreams actually happening, by building online platforms and proving that they can get out there and sell their own books.

So while chances are you aren’t the next Amanda Hocking, you have every chance of being the next me. (The phrase “the next me” sounds horribly egotistical but you know what I mean!) If your book has any appeal at all, there is simply no reason why you can’t get out there and do just as well or even a hell of a lot better than I did. And all the big e-book sellers write fiction and have published multiple books, whereas I have just one non-fiction title for sale – so you’ll be able to catch up quick!

What I Did, or Skip This Bit If You Know It All Already
If you know nothing about my self-printing adventures, here’s a quick summary: I used the Print On Demand service CreateSpace to ‘publish’ a 232-page paperback measuring 5.5 x 8.5 and both Amazon’s Digital Text Platform (DTP) and Smashwords to release an e-book equivalent. The book tells the story of the eighteen months I spent living in Orlando and working in Walt Disney World, and I decided to self-publish after being told by an agent and three different publishing houses that while it was well-written and an enjoyable read, it didn’t have enough of – or anything resembling – a market to warrant publication. It was released on March 29th 2010, and is for sale online.

My Print “Royalties”
They are unchanged, although since my previous Big Reveal post I have stopped selling through my website, direct to readers and through my local bookstore, as to make life easier for myself I have avoided as much as possible scenarios in which I have to order stock (because I have to pay for shipping).

Mousetrapped retails for $14.95 for the print edition. To publish a POD book you just need to pay for one proof copy and then whenever it’s ordered CreateSpace fulfills the order, takes their cut and pays you the rest. My print “royalties” (profits, really) in descending order, are as follows (all percentages rounded to the nearest whole number):

1. Createspace e-store: $7.92 or 53% of price*
2. Amazon.com: $5.07 or 34% of price
3. Extended Distribution, i.e. international Amazons, etc.: $2.22 or 15% of price.

*CreateSpace’s e-store is not really a viable selling option, as you have to register for a CS account before you can purchase from there and if that didn’t dissuade you, the ridiculous shipping costs most definitely would.

My E-book “Royalties”
The big change in e-book royalties since my last Big Reveal post is that Amazon’s 70% royalty rate has been extended to its UK and Canadian stores. This has made a huge difference to me, not least of all because I had a very good Christmas on the UK Kindle store, thank you very much, and UK payments are in British Pounds and come to me without any tax deductions. Smashwords has also increased the royalties for some retailers in its Premium Catalogue, e.g. iBooks, Barnes and Noble, etc. who switched to agency pricing on December 1st 2010.

Mousetrapped retails at $2.99 for the e-book edition. There are no costs involved in self-publishing an e-book, but getting paid works the same way: when someone downloads a copy, the e-book company takes their cut and you get the rest. My e-book royalties, in descending order, are as follows (all percentages rounded to the nearest whole number):

1. Direct from Smashwords.com: $2.06 or 70% of price
2. Kindle store higher royalty option: $2.06 or 70%**
3. Barnes and Noble: $1.81 or 60% of the price*
4. Apple’s iBooks: $1.80 or 60% of price*
5. Sony: $1.80 or 60% of price*
6. Kobo: $1.79 or 60% of price*
7. Kindle store at standard royalty option: $1.05 or 35% of price.

*Smashwords is the distributor. **The vast majority of my Kindle sales come in at the 70% royalty. NB: In order to qualify for the 70% royalty you must price your e-book between $2.99-$9.99. Evidence suggests that if you want your e-book to sell in the first place, you need to price it between 99c – $4.99.

My Sales Figures
Of my sales in the past twelve months, 12% were POD paperbacks and 88% were e-book editions.

Of my paperback sales:

1. 44% were from Amazon.com
2. 38% were from CreateSpace’s Expanded Distribution Channel, e.g. international Amazons, B&N online, etc.
3. 14% were from other outlets, such as me selling direct to family and friends, through my website, bookstore, etc.

E-book sales by location. If you upload to Amazon KDP you end up on both US and UK Kindle stores. Everyone else in this list is covered by upload to Smashwords. This graph is why I’m dumbfounded when I hear of e-book self-publishers uploading only to Smashwords (who have yet to sort their Amazon deal). KDP should be your priority.

Of my e-book sales:

1. 56% were from Amazon.com’s Kindle store
2. 35% were from Amazon.co.uk’s Kindle store
3. 4% were from Apple’s iBooks store
4. 3% were from Barnes and Noble’s Nook store
5. 1% were from the Smashwords website
6. 0.7% were from Sony’s e-book store
7. 0.3% were from Kobo’s e-book store.

Sales were pretty unimpressive up until September 2010, or six months after publication. This coincided with a significant bump up in my blog hits, which coincided with my first “Big Reveal” post. Maybe it was just a coincidence, as I do believe that the majority of my e-book readers find the book in the Kindle store by accident, i.e. key word search, Amazon recommendation, etc. In September, October and November I sold nearly the exact same amount of books each month: 180.

All sales per month.

Then in December: craziness. It was a good month anyway, probably because December is a good month for books for everyone, but on Christmas Eve, sales just took off. Between Christmas Eve and January 31st, I sold almost the same amount of books – 1,000 – than I had in the previous eight months. (424 in total in December and 882 in January.)

And here’s the interesting thing: for the first time ever, Amazon UK sales not only overtook Amazon US sales, but they did so significantly. Then the following month they went back down to about level with US sales, and in March they were only matching about 60% of US Kindle store sales, which is still a huge improvement on what the UK store was doing before Christmas, which was less than 30% of US store sales.

US Kindle store sales Vs UK Kindle store sales per month, March 2010-March 2011.

Detective Catherine therefore concludes that a lot of UK readers got Kindles for Christmas, and then went online looking for books to download to them. Lucky for me, many of them found Mousetrapped.

And if you’ve just self-published, hang on in there. A year ago I was selling about 2 books a day. But even if you never sell more than that, it still all adds up.

It took me AGES to figure out why my sales per day graph dips but my sales per month doesn’t. Clearly I hadn’t had enough coffee because of course it was because February has only 28 days. Therefore even though my sales per day went down in March (from 27 to 26), I still sold more copies in total during the month of March.

Money Matters
When people hear about this they say things like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah – but how much are you actually making from this? Like, how much do you get paid from these companies in any given month?“

This is impossible to answer accurately, because payment dates and frequency are all over the place. For example:

• Smashwords pays once a quarter and takes eons to update sales data
• Amazon KDP (US) pays at the end of the month for the calendar month that ended 60 days ago
• Amazon KDP (UK) pays in the middle of the month for the calendar month that ended 60+ days ago
• CreateSpace pays at the end of the month for the calendar month that ended 30 days ago, but has delays with its EDC sales reporting.

Therefore if I said, “Well, this month I got paid X amount,” it wouldn’t be an accurate reflection of what I actually earned this month, which is likely to be a very different figure.

So instead let’s do this: estimate what I earned this month. Will I get paid all this this month? No. I’ll get paid some of it this month, some next month, some in two months’ time, along with payments from other time periods. But at the end of the year I should be able to say that my earnings in March 2011 looked something like this:

• CreateSpace owe me for 70 paperbacks sold through EDC (which, confusing the issue right here at the beginning, probably weren’t sold in March) and 20 paperbacks sold through Amazon.com. My earnings here are $256.80
• Amazon KDP owes me for 439 US store sales and for 250 UK sales. The US store sales are a little tricky to work out because some will be at the 70% royalty rate (i.e. purchased by US customers) and some will be at the 35% rate (purchased from the US store from outside the US). But previous months suggest that about 10% of sales come in at 35% sow working off that Amazon KDP (US) will pay me around $859.79, and the KDP (UK) around $515.
• Smashwords – who knows? They normally pay me $70-90 per quarter, so let’s just throw in $25 for this.

That’s a total estimated gross in March 2011 of $1,656. (Or €1,175 or £1,033.)

Not too shabby for something that got finished a year ago, requires no additional effort now except for things I’d be doing anyway (blogging, tweeting, etc.) and is a Disney-themed travel memoir with a spectacularly niche appeal. It’s also purely income from book sales, and doesn’t include other potential income streams like feature writing, speaking engagements, paid blogging, etc.

It’s also more than I was making doing the job the book is about – as an entry level front desk agent in Walt Disney World, my gross was about $1,600 a month. Funny how things work out, isn’t it?

NB: I’m doing this a day ahead of time, so the figures might be slightly off from my actual March sales reported above.

It’s Not All About Numbers: The “Feelings” Corner
This post is, but self-publishing my book hasn’t been. Other than going to Florida in the first place (or going to Holland to start working in the travel and tourism industry, thus qualifying me for a J-1 visa a year and a half later), it’s been the best thing I’ve ever done. And rather than nix my chances of getting a traditional publishing deal, all it’s done is improve my chances, because I’ve proved that I can sell my own books, I’ve built a readership and I’ve managed to get publicity for my self-published book that some traditionally published books don’t get (The Sunday Times, The Marian Finucane Show on RTÉ Radio, etc.)

But there is another benefit that might be even more important in the long run: I feel like a writer now. A few months ago – before Mousetrapped sales took off – I was feeling very low about my Published Writer prospects. I’ve always believed (and I still do, deluded or not) that it will happen eventually, but I was getting desperate. If you’ve been following my blog you’ll know that thanks to a combination of hating my job with every fiber of my being and realizing that at 28, I may not have the opportunity to be so reckless again, I quit my job to live off my savings and finally write The Novel. (Also: Ireland had sunk into a recession, so it was suddenly socially acceptable to be unemployed!) As you can imagine, this put an enormous amount of pressure on me to succeed, both from myself, the people around me and my credit card company (!). When the novel went out on submission and got “We love it but we don’t love it enough” and “We love you, but we don’t love the book” it should have been great news, but instead I felt panicked at the thought of having to write a whole other book. I’ve always believed that you don’t just need free time to write but free headspace too, this pressure wasn’t doing any good for me or my novel.

Flash forward to today, and while Catherine is invariably highly caffeinated, she is also a lot calmer and relaxed. (Not when she looks at her To Do or To Read piles, but in general…!) If I get a traditional book deal, fantastic. But if I don’t get it for five or ten years, so be it. I’ll always have one eye on the phone, yes, but I won’t be biting my nails at the same time. Because I’m already doing what I love and getting paid for it; I already have readers. I’m already a writer. And I can’t tell you what emotional and psychological space that frees up.

The best part of all this though is that I’m in control. With my fiction, I’m not. I have to wait for someone else to say, “We want to publish this.” And if that’s all that was going on in my life, I’d be climbing the walls. But instead I have my non-fiction, which I can write, publish and sell whenever and however I want to. It makes the waiting so much easier, which means I can do it for longer without freaking out, chopping an agent-shaped chip in my shoulder and turning into one of those “Down with the Big Six!” self-publishers that I loathe and despise.

(If you’re wondering why I don’t just self-publish my novels too, you’ve clearly missed this post.)

If I Were to Do It All Again…
Well I am doing it all again, with a second travel memoir, Backpacked, this September. I talked yesterday about what I’m going to do differently this time around, but if I had to pick just five lessons learned it’d be these:

1. Make releasing the book one of the last things you do (building online platform, promotion, getting reviews, etc. all comes first).
2. Hire a cover designer. You CANNOT use the “Cover Creator” programs on those POD sites AND succeed. It’s one or the other.
3. Price your e-book at $2.99. This is the sweet spot: low enough so people take a chance, high enough to qualify for 70% royalty.
4. Don’t do any selling that involves you ordering stock (book launches, bookstores, etc.)
5. No matter what, wait a year.

(If you want to find out more about my self-printing adventures, you read the blog posts here, or wait until May 14th when my book Self-Printed: The Sane Person’s Guide to Self-Publishing comes out. You can read the (very long!) table of contents here.)

What Now?
I may be crazy to say this in public, but by the end of 2011 my goal is to have sold 20,000 books. It sounds like a huge number, but when you break it down it just about sounds doable. (Sort of!)

• I’ve already sold nearly 4,000 books, that leaves 16,000 more to sell
• If I continue to sell Mousetrapped at its current rate of about 700 copies per month, I’ll have sold another 6,300 copies of it by the end of the year, which leaves 9,700 more to sell which I’ll divide between the two books I’ve coming out in the next few months
• Self-Printed will be out in May, so let’s say that gives me 7 months (June-December) to shift 4,850 copies of it, or an average of 692 copies of it a month. I’m completely on the fence about whether or not this is doable. On one hand I think it has a far wider appeal than Mousetrapped does and in e-book form is fantastic value, if I do say so myself (100k words for only $2.99, people!) and then on the other I wonder why anyone would buy it?! So it could go either way. We’ll see.
• Backpacked, the sequel to Mousetrapped, will be out in September. I have high hopes for it and don’t think its unreasonable to imagine that it will do as well as Mousetrapped, especially considering it’s a more “mainstream” travel memoir and might therefore appeal to more people. There is also the primed readers factor; hopefully if you read and enjoyed Mousetrapped, you’ll want to read this as well. To make my 20k I’d also have to shift 4,850 copies of that but in less time – 1,212 copies of it a month between September and December, which is a very tall order indeed. But impossible? No. I hope not, anyway!

So crazy or not, 20k is the goal.

And I do like a good challenge…

You might also be interested in:

• The Big Reveal (from last September)
• E-books: The Tipping Point?
• What the Dream Looks Like: Why This Self-Publisher is Still Pursuing Traditional Publication

HarperCollins’ announcement of curtailments to ebook licences sold to libraries is at best diasappointing news, at worst it marks the beginning of a publisher driven assault on public libraries in the digital age.

With budgets for libraries already under attack across the world, ebooks seem to hold out hope of reducing budgets, while buying more books and helping readers to move smoothely into the digital age.

More then just threatening one bright spot in libraries budgets, this move endangers the growing support for ebooks among librarians who see them as an excellent way to promote literacy, reading and activities and values that bring immense value to book publishers. After all, many book readers buy books and ebooks from bookstores and online as well as reading library books.

Librarians are not seeking to change the fundamental structure of the industry, as Georgina Byrne puts it they are ‘just [trying to] facilitate customers who are at the front of a new way of reading.’

It would be sad if this move by HarperCollins were to be replicated by other publishers in the coming months and years, sad because it shows a distinct lack of interest in the issues, concerns and value of public libraries and sad because it will mark a closing of the ranks of publishers against the rising tide of ereading and demonstrate that they are in truth neither interested in ebooks OR public libraries.

For the sake of libraries, readers and ultimately for publishers themselves, IPN hopes that no publisher will join HarperCollins in this action and that HarperCollins soon see the error of their ways.

Image Credits:

Some rights reserved by [ henning ]

Catherine Ryan Howard writes a wonderful blog here. I read her post yesterday and asked her for permission to run it on Irish Publishing News, I think you’ll agree it’s both interesting and exciting.

~~~ ~~~ ~~~

Ten months ago I uploaded Mousetrapped to Smashwords and what was then called Amazon’s Digital Text Platform (DTP) – now Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) – almost as an afterthought.

I was looking for something to do while I waited for my Createspace proof copy to arrive.

Turns out it was the best afterthought I’ve ever had.

Back then, I knew nothing about e-books other than by giving my mother a Kindle for Christmas, I was saving real books from the horrors of her page-turning, sunscreen-smearing and unnecessary spine-bending. Therefore I presumed ebooks could only be a good thing, even if all they ever gave to the world was that. I had no clue that there was a growing army of self-published e-books authors selling thousands of titles a month and covering their mortgages payments with the proceeds, nor did I have any idea how easy e-books could be to sell.

I figured since all the work was already done, my e-book sales – if I got any – would just be bonuses. So I priced Mousetrapped‘s digital edition at $2.99 and waited to see what would happen.

My monthly e-book sales

The first month I sold 6 e-books from Smashwords and 9 from Amazon.com’s Kindle store. At the time Amazon was offering something like a 35% royalty rate and so I collected about $26 from the two outlets, barely enough to cover the cost of the paracetamol I had to take to combat the headaches I got from the formatting process.

The three months after that, I sold around 45-55 e-books a month.

In June, e-books overtook print sales significantly for the first time.

Then in September, a big jump: monthly e-book sales went up to around 150. This coincided with a jump in my monthly blog hits, which seemed to stem from my ‘Big Reveal’ posts. It may or may not have been related.

E-book sales versus print sales over time

So by the beginning of December I was selling 150-ish books a month, earning 70% of the list price off the vast majority of them and having e-books account for some 80% of my total sales. All the mega-selling e-books authors write fiction and have multiple titles for sale; I wrote a travel memoir about Disney and therefore was happy, frankly, to be selling anything at all.

Then over Christmas, something happened. Sales jumped up on Christmas Eve and never came back down.

In December 2010, I sold 369 e-books (and 45 paperbacks).

In January 2011, I sold 789 e-books (and 56 paperbacks).

And those numbers are only from Amazon’s Kindle stores, US and UK.

I presume I’ve sold more from the likes of iBooks, Barnes and Noble, Sony, etc. but Smashwords hasn’t reported those figures yet. In fact, the last time they reported sales data was Christmas Day, so when they do arrive they should be very interesting.

Something else interesting: in January, e-book sales of Mousetrapped were higher in Kindle’s UK store than in its US store. That had never happened before; US sales – which also include all Kindle book sales elsewhere in the world, besides the UK – were always well above their UK counterpart. Since the UK store went live in August, UK Kindle book sales of Mousetrapped counted for only about a quarter of my Kindle sales in total. But this January, the UK Kindle store reported 418 copies sold to the US store’s 371. My guess is that this has something to do with the fact that there were probably more brand new first time Kindle owners in the UK market than in the US, where early adopters were probably getting newer Kindles than buying or receiving them for the first time. But this is just a guess.

Kindle e-book sales: US versus UK store

One night in early January – when I could already tell that sales were up significantly – a thought occurred to me. Sure, it was great that I was on track to sell double what I’d sold the month before (especially when what I’d sold the month before was over double what I’d sold the month before that), but you know what was even better? I was getting paid for them: 70% of most sales. Because payments are so far behind (i.e. the one that arrives at the end of December is for sales that occurred in November), it hadn’t clicked with me that my monthly cheques would be taking the same bump up as my sales.

Back in April 2010, I received my first payment from Amazon: a whole $9.25.

This month they’ll be sending me $648.03.

And that’s already minus a 30% standard US tax withholding.

And that’s for December, when I did half the sales I did in January.

And here’s the thing: I didn’t do anything different. I’m doing the same thing now as I was doing back in the summer, when I was selling 150 a month, which is nothing but my usual: blogging, Twitter, the odd Facebook update.

And I had an e-book ready and waiting when thousands of new e-reader owners powered up their devices and went looking for something cheap to read on them this past Christmas.

This shows exactly the same information as one of the graphs above, but isn’t it snazzy?

Will this continue? Who knows. I – obviously! – hope it does. But considering the majority of self-published e-book authors who are selling at high rates write fiction and/or have multiple titles available, I’m pretty pleased – and shocked, and a bit confused, to be honest! – that a little travel memoir about working in Disney World, Space Shuttles, Bruce Willis, automatic transmissions and the Ebola virus is doing that well.

I think it also means that Mousetrapped is no longer a self-publishing success story – not in any kind of Print of Demand sense. I’ve sold around 360 paperbacks but does that matter? It pales in significance now to my e-book sales.

So really, this is now all about e-books.

And my book is non-fiction, a travel memoir about working in Disney. Take the example of Talli Roland, whose debut novel – the very funny The Hating Game – went on sale in Kindle’s store at the beginning of December. (Hers is traditionally published but in an unusual move, she and her publishers decided to release an e-book first to build word-of-mouth buzz about her paperback, as hardbacks may have done in the past. But Talli has been using social media to promote her book, as any self-published author can, and the book is priced at the magic $2.99 mark. So I think it’s fair to include her here.)

Talli sold 1,400 Kindle books in January.

It’s her first book, so she’s not relying on an established readership, it’s not crime or fantasy or sparkly vampires or any of the genres the Thousand E-Book Army seem to be writing, she only has the one book and not the three or six or nine the big sellers have, and it’s only been on sale for a bare eight weeks. And she’s shifted 1,400 copies in the last month.

And to prove the point that he isn’t the only one selling thousands and thousands of e-books, JA Konrath has been hosting a series of guest posts from similarly successful e-book self-publishers on his blog. They range from traditionally published authors who got their rights back to absolutely newbies to the publishing world, and their numbers will amaze you.

A year ago this may have been an anomaly, but now making a living selling e-books is becoming a trend.

You need to get in on it.

I get e-mails from self-published authors all the time (despite what it says on my Contact page!) or those considering it, asking silly questions like, ‘I’m on Smashwords… should I upload to Amazon DTP too?’ or ‘I have a print edition.. should I do an e-book?’

Here’s what you should do:

1. Get an e-book out there. NOW.
2. Upload to Amazon KDP.
3. Upload to Smashwords too.

And remember an e-book doesn’t have to be a full-length novel. This is an advertisement for you as a writer, so if your writing is short stories or a novella then so be it. Just price the e-book accordingly.

But do it.

What have you got to lose?