Treasure: Raised By Wolves: Volume Three Availability

So far, the battle of the 800 pound gorillas of book distribution has not affected Alien Perspective or me. I don’t think that will change by May, but times are a changin’ pretty fast these days…

I am a true independent publisher. Alien Perspective is a publishing company: it owns its own block of ISBNs, and has its own contract with a printer/distributor. I am not vanity or subsidy publishing – I do not pay someone else to “self-publish” my books for me. I do publish POD: my books are printed as they are ordered. This saves me massive amounts of upfront money; and, it is probably the way of the future for all books and publishers except for collectible “bibliophile” titles where people will want the exact look and feel of a book printed on an offset press. I don’t have to warehouse books or worry about shipping them, or taking orders directly, or all sorts of other overhead associated with being an independent publisher in prior decades.

It is my understanding that Amazon has targeted the vanity and subsidy presses in their latest land grab. Amazon is now offering vanity/subsidy publishing with Booksurge – which they own – so, of course, they can’t see why they should carry titles in their database that the author paid a company in direct competition with Booksurge to set up, print, and distribute – primarily through Amazon. The deal is, if these books have rankings below say 500,000, they aren’t selling very well, and Amazon is listing them for free, and so the publishing company listing them is using Amazon, and Amazon isn’t moving any product that they get profit from. Conversely, it should be noted, Amazon isn’t warehousing those non-selling titles - they order them when they get an order - so it’s not like it costs Amazon anything, either… But, you know, Amazon is a big company and they can see it however they want. So anyway, if Amazon forces the author of the non-selling book to use Booksurge, Amazon at least gets the Booksurge listing/setup/etc fees even if the book never sells. They are ostensibly trying to cut out the middle man vanity press: Publish America, Xlibris, The Great Unpublished, et al… (iUniverse does and does not count – they’re already owned by Barnes & Noble – lol.)

It’s regrettable that the poor misguided authors who are “publishing” through these vanity services are getting screwed yet again (the first time was by the vanity “press” – where they paid more for the privilege of having someone take care of the details for them than they would have paid to set their own company up and do it themselves – and they get an over-priced and ugly book to boot…); but, really, they should have done their homework.

I have been assured by my printer/wholesaler/distributor, Lightning Source, Inc. (LSI), that they are carefully monitoring the situation with Amazon. Their revenues could be affected by the Amazon land grab because most of the vanity/subsidy firms use LSI as their printer for the same reason I do: good quality product and access to Ingram and thus the world. What the vanity firms do is take an author’s money, throw the ms and the author’s amateur cover image in a template, assign the book an ISBN from the vanity firm’s block, decide on a price that allows them to make money off every sale (even while offering a standard industry 55% discount for a high unit cost POD printed book while splitting the profit with the author)(freaking high), and then print the book through LSI so that it gets listed in Ingram’s dbase and automatically picked up by Amazon.

A truly entrepreneurial author – like me – just skips all that middleman crap and retains complete control over the product in terms of quality and pricing. A really truly entrepreneurial individual also publishes other people’s books as a true publisher (never asks the author for a cent and bankrolls the whole process) through the same process they publish their own. It used to cost a small press around $10K to bring a book to press, I can do it for about $250 and I could teach you to do it too… I don’t do that – the publishing of other titles – because I tried it once and deemed it to be too much trouble and it took me away from writing…

Anyway… LSI is a subsidiary of Ingram, which is the largest book wholesaler in the US. Ingram is another 800 pound gorilla. They only have one real competitor, Baker & Taylor; and B&T has had all sorts of difficulties this last decade and I have heard many publishers don’t like working with them directly because they weren’t getting paid. (Conversely... Some retail stores don't like working with Ingram and prefer B&T because Ingram doesn't offer them the same discounts...) What remains to be seen is if Ingram can hold its own against Amazon (or Google for that matter); or rather it’s an aging silverback whose time has passed. I actually think that Amazon, or someone else, will muscle Ingram out of its place in the online retail distribution chain so that Ingram is reduced to only handling print books sold directly to the few remaining book stores in the next ten years. I’m betting that it isn’t now, though.

Amazon is very necessary to an independent publisher such as myself. Not solely because they sell two thirds of my books, but because the people making book buying decisions at other retailers, and the average reader, often turn to Amazon for product information – and discounts. Amazon’s database is free and available to the general public: Books In Print and Ingram’s database are not – and they don’t feature reader reviews, lists, and all the other things that Amazon’s interactive marketing machine offers. Amazon is truly a democratizing Godsend for independent presses; but, it is also a corporation with stock holders.

As of yet, I should not be targeted for database removal by Amazon: I am not paying someone in competition to the new services they offer: and, I am selling books through them consistently that they make a profit on – why should they bug me when there are hundreds of thousands of little books that don’t sell that they can pick on? But if they really get into it with LSI – not a thing either company will likely do, as Ingram is the wholesaler for most of the books Amazon carries (New York houses as well), and LSI prints 80% plus of the POD books in the US – you, my reader, will still not lose out. I, as a publisher, will do whatever I feel necessary to keep my books available. Essentially, if Amazon begins blocking all LSI printed books, I will consider printing with Booksurge so that my books can stay on Amazon. I will, of course, have to consider the cost and quality issue. If I deem it not worth my while – or yours – to allow Booksurge to print the books I sell on Amazon, I will pursue other means, such as the Amazon Advantage program (consignment selling) or another form of Amazon storefront to keep my books available to people who really want to buy them on Amazon. Remember, as I discussed in a prior post, my goal is to make my stories available to as many people as possible. I am not overly concerned about where they get printed as long as the quality is good and I have some control over the price so that I can keep it reasonable.

A note on that, though. I cannot control pricing for all overseas sales. I can control the price for the books printed through LSI’s UK branch – but I’ve never seen one to assess the quality and I have to price them fairly high because otherwise I end up owing LSI money. The far better way to handle European or worldwide book sales for paper books would be to go with a local printer; but folks, really, I’m way too small to do something like that right now. So I apologize for those of you having to pay more overseas.

So, for the foreseeable future – May, I hope :) - my books will still be available on Amazon in all the places (.de, .uk, etc…) they are now.

Treasure will also be available for Amazon’s Kindle format, just like the first two volumes. And… I will have Treasure available through Mobipocket and possibly other e-book variations – with Brethren and Matelots to follow into the same formats this summer after I make some corrections to them.

And… If ever any of you feel you cannot get the printed book through the retail method you used on the prior volumes, contact us/me. I am happy to sell books directly. I cannot take credit cards and you have to pay more for shipping per unit than you would through an online retailer, but I will have books and I can sell and ship them. Heck, I’ll even sign them.