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Daynotes
Journal
Week of 14 February 2011
Latest
Update: Sunday, 20 February 2011 10:16 -0500 |
08:34
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That USA Today article about Amanda Hocking was mistaken; she didn't
sell 450,000 ebooks in January. At the time they spoke to her in
mid-January, she'd sold 450,000 ebooks, total. That's since she started
in March of 2010. As it turns out though, the mistaken numbers aren't
far off because of Hocking's incredible ramp-up in sales volume. She
went from selling only a few hundred copies in March to selling a few
thousand in August and September to selling 169,000 ebooks in
December. That's about 40,000 a week, but sales were probably heavily
skewed toward late in the month, after everyone had gotten those
Christmas Kindles. My guess is that she probably sold 300,000+ ebooks
for the full month of January. The first week of this month she sold
100,000 ebooks.
None of that is good enough to get her on the NY
Times bestselling list. It's not because of her sales numbers. She's
sold more of some of her titles in one month than some of the NYTB
books sell in a full year. It's because the NYTB list is rigged. They
didn't count ebooks at all until very recently, and they now count only
ebooks from Big Six publishers. So, an ebook by, say, Random House, may
appear on the NYTB list if it sells only 10,000 copies, while one of
Hocking's ebooks that has sold 100,000 copies in ineligible.
Actually,
the NYTB list has become increasingly irrelevant, period. They lost me
when they arbitrarily banned the Harry Potter books from appearing on
the list because they were dominating it to the detriment of what the
editors considered to be "more deserving" books. The USA Today
bestselling list is at least honest.
Meanwhile, Hocking is
thinking about buying a used car. A 2005 model, to be exact. I don't
think she's realized yet that those $400,000 per month paychecks she's
getting aren't a fluke. She did mention on her blog that she's thinking
about buying her first house, for cash.
Tuesday, 15 February 2011
00:00
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Wednesday, 16 February 2011
12:21
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Things have been and remain hectic around here. It wasn't that I forgot
to post here yesterday; I thought about it, but didn't have time.
I have so much to do that I can't possibly consider doing anything else, and yet...
It's
fascinating to watch the success of some indie fiction authors with
e-books. The thing about fiction, although nearly all fiction authors
will deny it, is that fiction is fast and easy to write, at least if
you're a competent author. Non-fiction is time-consuming and
difficult. I can't begin to remember the number of times that I've
spent literally hours researching and doing something only to have it
turn into one paragraph or even one sentence in a non-fiction book.
Hell, I'm doing that now with the biology lab book. To write fiction,
you simply sit down and start writing. You make stuff up. Certainly,
you have to maintain consistency in what you're making up, but that's
not particularly difficult.
One time, just as a test, I sat down
to write some fiction. I spent one hour doing it, and ended up with
about 1,000 words written. I filed that with a reminder to look at it
again in a couple of months. When I came back to it, I read it as
though I'd never seen it before. It scanned well. So, I know I can
write fiction at roughly 1,000 words an hour. At that rate, working
eight hours a day, it would take me a couple weeks, give or take, to
knock out a full-length novel. Even if I assume only 50% efficiency
doing heads-down fiction writing, that's still a book a month. If I
assume only 25% efficiency, that's still six books a year. Assuming no
re-write, of course, but re-write is a dirty word to me.
There's an interesting post
on Joe Konrath's blog about one newbie author's experience. She's
written only one book, and sales were very slow for the first several
months. Then her book gained critical mass in December, and she's now
selling 600 copies a day. The $0.99 price is a key part of that, and
she does have a good cover, but I suspect there's more to it. I haven't
read her book yet, although I just bought it. I'd bet it will be
well-written and -edited, which is unfortunately something that can't
be said for a lot of the newbie indie books. She is making one mistake:
the book has DRM on it.
People who buy e-books aren't going to
put up with that for much longer. We need complete portability between
readers. If someone gives me a gift certificate for Barnes and Noble, I
want to be able to use it to buy e-books even though I don't have a
Nook. Of course, that's no real problem for me and other
technically-literate people. It's easy enough to strip the DRM and
convert the file to a different format. But most people don't know how
to that and don't care to learn how to do it. It's really going to piss
them off when they find they can't read their Amazon e-books on a new
Nook that someone gave them as a gift, or vice versa. Enough so that
many will simply go the free route and start downloading unauthorized
copies. Not because those copies are free, but because they don't have
DRM.
Billions of music tracks are sold at $0.99, when it's easy
to get them for $0.00. The key is convenience and pricing. People won't
even bother to look for free copies if the original ebook is selling
for $0.99 and can be ordered and downloaded with one click. There's
simply no need for DRM. It just gets in the way of honest people while
doing absolutely nothing to prevent unauthorized copies from
circulating. If I do end up writing novels, one thing you can be
absolutely sure of; they won't have DRM.
Thursday, 17 February 2011
09:31
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Apple has always been one of my least-favorite companies, lower in my
estimation than even Microsoft. I see that Apple has now made their
money-grab official. They're demanding a 30% cut of e-book sales,
including those that they have absolutely nothing to do with. If you
buy an e-book from Amazon, Apple insists that they get 30% of the
purchase price, even if you buy it directly from Amazon. If Apple
manufactured vehicles, they'd demand a 30% cut each time you filled
your tank. Apple's so called walled garden is now a prison camp, with
barbed-wire fences and machine gun towers.
A lot of the articles
about this miss the point. One can, they say, simply buy books directly
from Amazon and read them on an iPad with the Kindle app. But that's
just the problem. Apple thinks they've blocked all alternatives.
They've forbidden apps from providing an option to allow an iPad user
to buy directly from Amazon. All purchases from the Kindle app running
on an iPad or other IOS device must go through Apple, which takes its
30% cut. Furthermore, Apple insists that the price of the ebooks be the
same or lower for purchases through the iPad app as from any other
source. Apple has also blocked the obvious solution. Amazon could
simply remove the purchasing function from the app, turning it in just
a reader. iPad owners could then buy directly from Amazon and just use
the iPad app to read the Kindle books. But Apple insists that if a
product is sold elsewhere it must also be available for purchase
through the app. They screw you coming and going.
The problem is
that hardly anyone buys ebooks through Apple. My self-publishing
friends have their books available for all platforms. One can buy them
through Amazon, B&N, Smashwords, Apple, and so on. All of them say
that Apple sales are tiny compared to Amazon. One of them is selling
about 1,200 ebooks a day, with almost 90% of that total coming from
Amazon sales, close to 10% through B&N, and most of the remainder
through Smashwords and other sources. Direct Apple sales are less than
200 copies a month, or less than 0.5% of the total. Of course, many
people are reading these ebooks on Apple devices, but buying them
through Amazon. Apple hates that.
Amazon operates on the agency
model. The publisher (or indie author) sets the retail price. Amazon
pays 70% to the publisher/author and keeps the other 30%. Apple wants
all of Amazon's share. There's been a lot of speculation on the indie
author forums about what happens next. Most people think Amazon will
reduce the royalty rate from 70% to 40%, thereby having 30% available
to give Apple and still having 30% available for themselves. I don't
think that's what's going to happen. I think Amazon will probably do
nothing. If Apple wants to kill the Kindle app, Apple can take the heat
for it. At most, I'd expect Amazon to compromise by removing the
purchasing function from the app. In theory, that'd mean Apple would
sell more e-books. In practice, I suspect most IOS users would continue
to purchase directly from Amazon, because the Apple bookstore sucks big
time. Whatever happens, I don't think Apple is going to have things its
way. Amazon simply can't afford to let Apple get away with this.
Stepping
back from the immediate situation, in a larger sense this may help
publishers/authors realize that DRM is their enemy. Apple's attack is
not on Amazon ebooks per se. It's on .azw ebooks, the ones with Amazon
DRM. If neither Amazon nor Apple blinks, expect to see Apple kill the
Kindle app come 30 June. At that point, iPad users won't be able to
read DRM'd ebooks from Amazon. But--and here I'm assuming that there
will be a reader for non-DRM'd .mobi ebooks available--they'll still be
able to read books purchased from Amazon.com that have no DRM.
The
real problem is the attempt by vendors to tie individual ebook copies
to specific devices. No one nowadays would put up with a vendor locking
purchased music files to a particular brand of MP3 player, and there's
no reason we should put up with vendors locking purchased ebooks to a
particular brand of e-reader. All of the advantages of DRM are
illusory; all of the drawbacks are very real. As more publishers and
authors begin to realize that, I think we'll see unprotected ebooks
become the norm. It's no coincidence that many of the bestselling
titles in the Kindle Store are shown as "unlimited devices".
It's
also encouraging that many of the small publishers and indie authors
are recognizing that $2.99 or less is the right price for an ebook. I
said years ago that ebooks, assuming they have no DRM, should be priced
at most the same as a used paperback copy, because that's their natural
value. In either case, people are paying just for the story. In either
case, when they finish reading it, they can stick it on the shelf,
pitch it, or give it to someone else. Small publishers and indie
authors who recognize this will do well. Those who have an inflated
idea of the value of an ebook will fall by the way.
10:08
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One day blurs into another and my to-do list doesn't seem to get any
shorter. Barbara and I drove over to L&R Transmissions first thing
this morning to pick up her Trooper. AAMCO rebuilt the transmission,
charged us $2,500, and didn't solve the problem. I wish I'd looked at
the BBB ratings first. L&R has an A+ and AAMCO an F. Unfortunately,
we assumed that because Merchant's Auto recommended AAMCO they'd do
right by us. They didn't.
The problem turned out to be, of all
things, the alternator. The guy from L&R had to drive the truck
around with an analyzer connected to it. Periodically, the alternator
voltage would increase by several volts for two or three seconds, which
basically stunned the transmission computer senseless. At any rate, the
problem appears to be solved. And I'll tell anyone I know never, ever
even consider taking your vehicle to an AAMCO. Ever.
Work continues on the biology book and the microchemistry kits. One
issue I'm paying a lot of attention to for the biology book is
reproducibility. Students who are just starting out need lab sessions
that work as expected every time. There'll be plenty of time later for
them to find out that experiments don't always work as expected, to say
the least.
Saturday, 19 February 2011
10:29
- Last night, we finished watching series one of Da Vinci's Inquest,
a Canadian program that reminds me of some older British series: low
production values combined with excellent scripting and acting. It was
shot in Vancouver, BC, and almost all of the cast seem to be from
there. I have this image in my mind of the producer showing up one day
in Vancouver and shouting in the public square that he's going to film
a TV series and who wants to be in it. We'll definitely continue with
series two and three on Netflix streaming but alas the remaining
seasons aren't available either streaming or on DVD, at least from
Netflix.
And speaking of Netflix streaming, thanks to Jim Cooley for pointing out that Downton Abbey
is now available streaming. It's been in my DVD queue since Netflix
announced its availability, but it's still showing as "incredibly,
unbelievably long wait", or something like that. We're still on the
3-discs-at-a-time plan for $20 a month or whatever. I'd happily pay
that $20/month for streaming only if Netflix had everything available
streaming that's available on DVD.
Interesting post on Joe Konrath's blog.
One of his big-name author friends is dithering about accepting an
offer from a Big 6 publisher. Two books, with a $200,000 advance. Per
book. She's not sure she wants to accept the offer, because she thinks
she can do better publishing the books herself. Personally, I think
she'd be making a big mistake to take the $400,000. It's the cheese in
the trap. She can do better herself, much better.
I don't know
who she is, but if one of the Big Six is offering her $400,000 for two
books, she's an established name. (Typical mid-list authors, which is
to say one's you've probably heard of if you're a serious reader, are
getting advances of $10,000 or $20,000. At $200,000 per book, this
woman is just a small step below the biggest names.) She can do better
selling only 1,000 self-pubbed ebooks a month, and there are a lot of
no-name authors who are currently doing that well or better on
Amazon.com. My guess is that she'd probably do 10,000 copies a month of
each of her books if she self-pubbed, which means she'd have made more
than $400,000 long before either of her Big Six pubbed books ever got
into the bookstores, let alone both. That's assuming, of course, that
there are any bookstores left by 2015 or so, and that her Big Six
publisher is still in business.
Most people would probably
consider accepting the $400,000 advance the safe bet, but I don't
believe that's true. Self-pubbing is a much safer bet. First, advances
aren't paid in one big chunk in advance. She'll probably be paid the
advance in three chunks for each book, the last of which she'll be
entitled to when the book is actually published. If that ever happens,
as I said, and if the publisher is still able to meet its commitments
years down the road. Second, by self-pubbing she can start earning
money immediately rather than waiting years for the book to get into
print and then earn out its advance, if it ever does. Third, if she
signs that contract, she's locking her books up. She'll likely never
earn another cent on those books other than the advance.
Her
luck would have to be truly terrible to earn less than $100,000 per
year per book self-pubbing. Assuming both books are ready to go now,
that means she'd cross the $400,000 line two years from now, at which
point one of the traditionally published books would just have been
published and the other would still be in production. I agree with Joe
Konrath. For this author, self-pubbing is the only reasonable decision.
It's only fear of the unknown that's holding her back.
10:16
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We did a little process experiment yesterday to determine how long it
would take to label chemical containers for the microchemistry and
biology kits. We're using 15 mL centrifuge tubes as chemical
containers. The tubes and screw caps are polypropylene, which is quite
resistant to all of the chemicals we're including in the kits--the most
corrosive of which are 6 M solutions of acetic acid, ammonia,
hydrochloric acid, and sodium hydroxide--and their capacity is
appropriate. I buy the tubes in bulk, in cases of 1,800 tubes
packaged in rigid foam blocks of 50 tubes each. I'll use those blocks
for shipping, with each block containing about 40 tubes of chemicals,
half a dozen glass test tubes interspersed, and the remaining slots
filled with empty centrifuge tubes.
I was concerned about how
long it would take to label the tubes--which is the most
labor-intensive part of assembling the kits--so we made a test run
yesterday, with Barbara labeling tubes as she watched a golf tournament
on TV. Working at a relaxed pace, she was able to label about 300 tubes
an hour. That's the main label; there are also cap labels to apply. So,
the upshot is that Barbara and I working together over the course of an
evening should be able to apply main and cap labels to enough tubes to
make up between two dozen and three dozen kits, all without breaking a
sweat. That means we could ship 500 kits a month without difficulty,
and 1,000 kits a month if we pushed it.
That really speaks to
reserve capacity more than anything. Kit sales are likely to be highly
cyclical, with a huge bump in time for the start of the fall semester,
a smaller bump in time for the start of the January semester, and a
still smaller bump in time for summer session. Overall, I'd
be happy if we shipped 500 microchemistry kits in the first twelve
months they're available, with the biology kits ramping up late this
year.
That's one of the reasons I'm pushing so hard to get the
biology lab book finished. I want to be able to start selling it (and
the kits) in time for the January semester next year. If that book
sells as well as I expect it to, we'll have a flood of orders for
the biology kit soon after the book is released, because a lot of home
schoolers won't hesitate to start a biology lab course in the January
semester.
Copyright
© 1998,
1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010,
2011
by
Robert
Bruce
Thompson. All
Rights Reserved.