Goodbye, Hukilau: why I'm no longer running a digital publisher

As of this weekend, I’m no longer in the e-book publishing business. I’ve enjoyed it, but I don’t see it as something that’s worth pursuing any longer, and I've handed the keys to Hukilau over to someone else.

There are two main reasons for this. This isn't a blame game or an excuse: it's just the way the market has developed, and it's both a curse and a blessing.

Reason 1: writers don’t need digital publishers any more

When we started Hukilau, it wasn’t easy to get an e-book published. The tools were arcane, the formats were obscure, and the submission processes were tortuous. You could go it alone, but you needed to be pretty tech-savvy and persistent just to get your book into the retail channels. We offered people the opportunity to side-step all that. They gave us their books in whatever format they had, and we’d get them out onto the Web sites with no effort on their part. It was a useful role, and it bridged the gap between the author and the retailer in a simple, understandable way. 

Now, though, it’s dead simple to publish your own e-books.  There are a range of really simple formatting tools around, and places like Smashwords will even accept your Word file, so you don’t have to know anything at all about e-book formatting to get your book onto Kindles, Nooks and iPads the world over.  It takes literally ten minutes to put your book on Amazon or Smashwords after the first time you’ve done it. There’s simply no need for a publisher to get involved.

Incidentally, I don’t think of places like Smashwords as publishers in the traditional sense. They’re distribution services for self-publishers. They don’t curate their content in any way, or promote anything they handle – the two things that in my mind define a digital publisher. What Smashwords and their ilk provide is a public conduit that allows anyone to get their books onto the major retailers with minimal friction. It's a great service, but it's not the same as a publisher.

Writers make better promoters than publishers anyway

When it comes to promotion, it’s become clear that self-promotion by individual authors is just as successful as publisher promotion for the majority of titles. Unless the publisher is prepared to pay out for a major marketing campaign and start putting ads on the sides of buses to attract new users, there’s very little they can do anyway. Readers are more interested in what their friends, other readers, bloggers, and the author themselves have to say than any PR from a publisher.  

This is nothing new – the vast majority of successful authors have always been the ones with a gift for self-publicity. What’s new is that there is now a huge and vibrant community that allows people to promote themselves for free. Most authors would do better to spend their time getting active on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, the blogosphere, and Goodreads for an hour or two a day, rather than signing up with a publisher and hoping they will be able to magically create interest.

And let’s face it, publishers just don’t have the same level of interest in a book as the author. A publisher wins by having a large enough catalog to make a decent aggregate income. Most of the individual books in their catalog just don’t matter. Publishers are looking for the big winners and will be happy with small returns from the majority of their titles, and they won’t spend time pushing something that’s not doing well. They’ll just move on to the next new book. Authors, on the other hand, care passionately about every one of their books, and will give them as much attention as they can.

An author has to ask, “what exactly can a publisher do for me that I can’t do better and more cost-effectively myself?”  Looking at it from an author’s point of view, I have to shake my head and answer, “I honestly don’t know.”  I can’t see any reason to give away a sizeable chunk of my earnings to someone simply for submitting a document to a Web site and listing me in their catalog.  If I’m going to go with a publisher, they’ll have to provide me with editing services, cover artwork, and promotion.

Under those circumstances, I didn’t feel it was right to continue offering those services to authors under what felt like false pretences.

It’s actually a pretty amazing state for authors to be in. You don’t need publishers any more. The world is out there, and you have everything you need to get your book in front of people. So go, publish, and make your dreams come true.

Reason 2: there’s no money in it

With all the amazing sales figures we’re seeing from the e-book market, you’d have thought digital publishing was a lucrative business. Sadly, it’s just not so.

Let’s look at a few hard numbers. 

In our recent promo, we shipped nearly 10,000 books in a week. At our usual $2.99 price point, that would break down as roughly $3,400 to the retailers, $3,300 to the authors, and $3,300 for us.  Less our running costs, the three of us would have made $1,000 each. That’s not bad for a week’s work, and if we’d been able to sustain that every week, we’d have made a passable living.

But that’s a tough order. 10,000 books a week, every single week. Half a million books a year, if you prefer. Given that 90% of books sell fewer than 1000 copies, you’ve got to have a sizeable catalog to make anywhere near those numbers – even if we had 500 titles, every one of them would have to be in that top 10%.  Realistically, we’d need more like 5000 titles. That would mean shipping 20 new titles every single day for a year, which means they wouldn’t get any personal attention from us. We’d just be slamming them out, hoping we’d accidentally get some hits. And as I said above, who needs a publisher who doesn’t care about their books?

A little side note here to illustrate how hard it is to make 1000 sales of an e-book. During our promo period, we took several top spots in various Kindle categories. It took us just 80 downloads to get the #1 spot in a major category like Music. It took a mere 70 to get the #1 spot in Movies. 350 downloads was enough to get one of our titles into the top 25 non-fiction as a whole, and 120 downloads put us just outside the top 50.
In other words, only 24 non-fiction books had shipped more than 350 copies on Amazon that week, and only about 50 books had shipped more than 100 copies. Those numbers are tiny. There are a lot of books being shipped overall, but not very many of each individual book.

But isn't that just bad business planning?

You could argue that we could increase our prices and then we wouldn’t need to sell as many books.

But here’s the rub. When I said we shipped 10,000 books in a week, every single one of those was free. When we tried selling those books at $4.99 and above, we made almost no sales at all outside friends and family. Most of the time, we were talking single digit sales per month, sometimes zero. We dropped the price to $2.99 and did a little better. Even at $0.99, we got next to nothing.  The only books that were selling in respectable numbers were those by known authors which were already available in print, where e-books were a cheap, convenient alternative.

It wasn’t due to the quality of the books. They were good books. They got good reviews. People liked them. People told their friends – who then didn’t buy them.

The problem was, as we effectively proved, that you can’t compete with free. There are so many good free titles on the market that most people won’t even pay a dollar to take a chance on an unknown author.  Seth Godin recently argued that mid-list authors shouldn’t expect to get paid. And if they don’t get paid, their publishers don’t get paid either.

But there are plenty of people making money from selling books, aren't there?

Yes, there is money to be made selling e-books, no question about it, but the majority of the authors who are making sales fit into one or more of three categories:

1. big-name authors who already have a following in print; 

2. people writing series who have built up a devoted cult following from previous books; and 

3. self-motivated, self-published authors who are hustling their butts off day in, day out, to build up a following. 

First-time casual authors just aren’t making sales, no matter how good their books are, and the type of author who goes to a digital publisher - almost by definition - isn’t the kind of author who’s prepared to put in that kind of effort on their own PR. 

To make money as a publisher, we’d have to have a legion of authors in those three popular categories, or else we’d be forced down the Smashwords model, where we ship thousands and thousands of books every month, and are content if we make a couple of bucks off each one.  The former was highly unlikely to happen, and the latter isn’t why I wanted to be in publishing.

The future of digital publishing

I don’t think there’s a role for the kind of publisher that we originally set Hukilau up to be. However, I do see two types of digital publisher surviving.

Print publishers with a digital arm will still be important. In fact, I’d argue that any print publisher that doesn’t have a digital arm will soon be about as successful as a film studio that only distributes on VHS or a record label that only does vinyl. Readers will soon expect to see every print title in digital form, and having a print edition of a book removes the stigma of it being “only” an e-book.

And then there will be the niche publishers who pick a very small genre and stick to it, regularly releasing a constant stream of very similar titles to cater to loyal repeat customers. A few thousand regulars spending $10 per month on average would make for a comfortable little one-person publishing outfit that could provide a reasonable income for a small stable of fast-writing authors. The erotica publishers have proved this market very effectively. I can imagine the same would work for small publishers focusing on steampunk, historical detective stories, world cookbooks, military history, dystopian sci-fi, or similar subject matter. It’s not about selling good books, it’s about finding a market with an insatiable appetite for a specific type of book, and feeding it non-stop. It’s a good route for new authors, because it introduces them to a community that’s already pre-disposed to what they’re writing, it’s good for readers as it fulfils a need, and it works as a publishing model.

Outside those two areas, however, I believe that self-publishing will render traditional publishing models obsolete in the digital market. In many ways, it already has. From a small publisher’s standpoint, that’s a tough problem, and my reaction, after a lot of soul-searching and analysis, is to quit the business. 

I don't regret what we did with Hukilau. We helped some people get their books out there, and I was part of a new, exciting development in a medium I care passionately about. But now, it's a different world, one which is ruled by the authors - the people who've traditionally had a shitty deal from publishers. And that, my friends, is a Good Thing. A Very Good Thing Indeed.

Liberating the authors

From an author’s point of view, right now is a golden opportunity. However, you’re now competing against a million other self-published authors instead of twenty thousand published authors. You're no longer joining a small and exclusive club when you get your book out there. According to some figures I've seen, more books were published in the first week of January 2012 than were published in the whole of 2009, and it's only going to accelerate. 

The great thing about self-publishing is that anyone can now publish a book. 

The problem with self-publishing is that anyone else can now publish a book.

Good luck!

Free books!

I love free stuff. Who doesn't?

And I really love free books. For the last couple of months, I've downloaded on average two free novels and two short stories a day. I'm not talking about a load of old public domain stuff from Gutenberg, or classic literature from Amazon. I'm talking about modern books by contemporary authors.

It's not like I'm downloading any old rubbish. Every single day, I get carefully selected recommendations for between twenty and thirty free novels, covering a huge variety of genres. I've downloaded loads of books from the backlists of well-known print publishers. I read tweets and Facebook posts from dozens of authors and digital publishers talking about their new work. There's no shortage of free e-books, and the rate is rocketing. Nobody's quite sure how many e-books are published every month, but a figure of 50,000 seems conservative. However you look at it, that means there are hundreds, if not thousands of free e-books coming out every single day.

Sure, some of them have been mediocre. A few have been unreadable. But most of them have been pretty good. In other words, they've been just as good as the books I've paid for, either in print or digital.

Of course, I'm not actually reading two books a day. I'm accumulating reading material faster than I can possibly absorb it, and it's not costing me a penny. As a reader, I love this. All my reading needs are being taken care of, totally gratis, and completely legit. There are enough authors out there who want to give their work away that I don't need to buy a single book.

As an author and publisher, however, it concerns me massively. With this much good quality free material around, who's going to buy books?

A lot of writing blogs will tell you that the secret to making sales is to give your book away, build up a following, and then start charging when you've started to become popular. Sadly, it usually doesn't work. I recently published some of my fiction works. When they were free, I was getting 1000-1500 downloads a month. Once I put the price up to 99c, that dropped to just 1 or 2 a month - which is typical of most people's experience, from what I can tell. They'd been getting 5 star reviews, but even so, people weren't prepared to pay even a dollar. Why should they, when there are thousands of perfectly acceptable free alternatives?

A year ago, I wrote about the problems of the "freemium" software model. It's a nice idea in theory: you make a free product, get a following, and then charge your most dedicated users for a pro version. What usually happens, though, is that just as you start to charge, someone else comes along with a free version of whatever you're now charging for, and your customers go elsewhere. As long as there are people giving away free stuff to build their market share, it's almost impossible for anyone else to charge.

Obviously, this doesn't apply to the market leaders. As Seth Godin pointed out, if you want to read the latest Neil Gaiman or Terry Pratchett, you have no alternative. They're unique, they're the writing elite, and people will always buy their work. In fact, they'll buy it again and again even if they already have it. In some ways, it's less about the actual reading, and more like collecting. But for the majority of authors, there's no compelling reason why I need to buy their books unless they're part of a series which I've already invested time in.

The problem isn't the price. I got exactly the same number of sales at $0.99, $1.99 and $2.99. Single digits. If someone's decided they're prepared to pay for a book, then they're not going to hum and ha over a dollar or two. The fact is, there's a huge hurdle between free and paid, even more than between cheap and mid-price.

The problem is simply that the majority of people are not prepared to pay for e-books, because they know they can get plenty of good books for free elsewhere. Many readers have become conditioned to believe that digital books should be free. I've lost count of the number of people who've told me that publishers should make all their backlist available free "because it doesn't cost anything for an e-book". That's simply not true - even if you start from a digital copy, it takes time to make the digital book files, upload them, and so on. If all you've got is print, it needs to be scanned, which is time-consuming. And that's before you even get into the legal side of it, since the chances are that the original publishing contract didn't include digital publication.

As more authors give their work away, the more this view is becoming entrenched. With everyone scrambling to attract readers by giving away freebies, we're basically telling readers that there's an unlimited supply of good material and there's no need to pay. In fact, there's no real incentive even to read them. Grab them, stick them on your Kindle, and who cares if you forget about them? It's not like they actually cost anything. It's not like they're actually worth anything...

In the coming year, I don't think the big debate in e-publishing will be about what the "right" price will be. I fear it'll be about whether indie authors, small publishers, and self-publishers will be able to charge at all, or whether we'll be overwhelmed with the flood of free content.

Side note: during the writing of this blog post, I received 7 messages offering me a total of 41 free books, and downloaded 3 novels and 4 short stories. 

Novellas and short novels

One of the things I've noticed is that a lot of the novel submissions I get sent for Hukilau feel like they're too long, as if they've been padded out to hit the publishers' sweet spot of 80,000 words, when in reality they'd be better as short novels, or even novellas.

Print publishers don't like short books. They take about as much work to create and market, but they don't generate as much money. And readers like to buy big books so they feel they've got their money's worth. When I was first reading, I was used to novels of 150 pages. Now most publishers won't even touch anything under 300 pages, and some genres seem to demand even more.

E-books, on the other hand, don't have that sort of prejudice. I'm wondering whether e-books are going to spark a revival in shorter forms.  Any thoughts?

Memories of a Future Life (the end)

About a month ago, I wrote about Roz's new book, My Memories of a Future Life. Well, more accurately, I wrote about Episode 1. Not Volume 1, note, Episode 1. Roz took the unusual step of releasing her novel in four instalments for Kindle, and it's only now become available as a single book.

Before I return to the format, I guess I should say something about the book. I almost feel like I should be doing a proper literary criticism, of the sort I haven't done since school: Synopsis, Themes, Characters, Style, Symbolism, Summary. That's because this feels like a proper bit of "literature". That's a word I use with some trepidation: usually "literature" means "stuff I feel like I ought to have read but probably won't actually enjoy" - whether it's modern lit or classic lit. And don't get me started on "chick lit". This isn't one of those bits of "literature", though. It's intelligent, thoughtful, and heavily character-based, yes, but it's also very easy to read and it's got a damn good story. That's because most of Roz's books are very different. She's written under a number of well-known names, including [REDACTED] and [CAN'T TELL YOU OR I'D HAVE TO KILL YOU], and she knows how to tell a rattling good yarn. She's not your usual literary novelist.

One of her other readers summed it up best - Memories is like John Fowles's The Magus. I loved that book when I was a teenager, and I'm now getting a hankering to read it again. It's the sort of literature I enjoy reading, combining a slightly unsettling plot with hints of more beyond. It's not the depressing realism of your typical Booker novelist or the light fluffiness of a slice of middle class city life.

Memories is about a pianist who can't play any more who goes to a hypnotist and starts channelling, not a past life, but a future life. Anything more would be a spoiler, so I'll stop right there. Roz's writing is some of the sharpest I've read in a while. She uses short, punchy sentences, punctuated by powerful metaphors and vivid descriptions. The result is some of the most readable prose I've come across in a while.

I will admit that after the first episode, I was slightly dubious about where it was going. I was enjoying it, but once she introduced characters who were regressing to past lives involving Jack the Ripper, there was a small part of me inwardly groaning and hoping it wasn't going to turn into some cheesy From Hell scenario. By the end of the second episode, I still wasn't much reassured. But I'm glad I stuck with it, because the end is an absolute rip-roarer. (Her husband Dave popped up on Twitter when I mentioned my concerns, and assured me I wouldn't anticipate the end. He was right. I should have known Roz wouldn't resort to cliche without good reason. She's better than that.)

Here's my one grouse. The release in instalments didn't work for me. I wanted to read the whole thing in one go. I didn't like waiting for the next episode to come out. In fact, after Episode 2, I decided to skip Episode 3 the following week and waited until the whole thing was published.

As a marketing technique, I hope it worked for Roz - self-publishing is a challenge at the best of times, and you have to do whatever you can to get attention. I certainly tweeted and facebooked about it much more than I would have done if I'd just bought the one book. But as a reading experience goes, I wish I'd waited and read it straight through. To be fair, I find the same with comics and television series - I enjoyed the anticipation of waiting for next week's Doctor Who or 2000 AD when I was a kid, but now I'd prefer to settle down for a long session whenever it's convenient for me.

However, none of this is a problem for anyone out there. It's all out now, and you can buy the complete novel for $9.99 on Kindle or $14.95 on paper. (You can still get all four episodes separately for $0.99, but not for much longer.)

So yes, I enjoyed this immensely. I'm torn between 4 and 5 stars, but that's only because I'm really, really picky when it comes to giving out 5-star ratings, and I'd have enjoyed it more without the enforced breaks in the middle. However, it's an easy four and a half. Memories is sharp, well-written, and a damn good read, and I'm looking forward to whatever Roz does next.