The Kindle effect
Think about what self-publishing was like a decade ago. It wasn't even called that, it was called Vanity Press and this label already said it all. It was the vanity fair, the frivolous complacency of something objectively inconsistent with the other than itself.
Then came the Amazon Kindle and the Kindle effect. It was November 19, 2007 and this can be considered the birth date of the new publishing industry. People who couldn't find space in traditional publishing began to entrust their work to the Kindle store, the platform created by Amazon around the Kindle e-reader. Candidate authors for the Vanity Press, who previously hoarded the copies purchased for a fee from the printer/publisher on duty, discovered that there was a market for them, a real market and not just a promised one. It was the marketplace opened up by Amazon that ran like a jaguar.
It cost nothing to publish and even received royalties at the end of the month with the punctuality of a Swiss train. Even more astonishing is that consumers did not buy books, but downloaded a file to read, a file that could hardly be pirated and perhaps not even worth it. Furthermore, it cost nothing to produce this file. Amazon did it for them to which you could send the Word or OpenOffice file with a click. It was such a smart thing that it could not fail to have a sequel, in fact just two years after the Kindle the phenomenon exploded and the first pioneering authors were gradually joined by other subjects who decided to invest in this channel. Digital publishers, hybrid publishers, service providers, blogs and magazines that deal with self-publishing and even the most famous literary agencies have arrived and have decided to divert their clients towards this channel.
A tsunami of content and creativity
For public opinion, what happened on this channel was encapsulated in a black box and even the specialized press did not know what to think and swayed between astonishment and indifference. Amazon did not disseminate any data and the official statistics did not go into the least census of this phenomenon. Which then turned out to be gigantic. The biggest bestseller of the past decade, Fifty Shades of Gray, is by a self-published author. Over 50 self-published authors have sold more than one million copies in the past five years on the Kindle Store. One-third of the top 40 titles sold each week on Amazon are by self-published authors.
This positioning is not only due to the quality of the new publishing titles; it is also due to the foolishness of traditional publishers who price ebooks in a reckless way so as to eliminate any advantage that the better quality of the content would procure them. While a self-published ebook costs between $3 and $5 on average, a traditional publisher's ebook costs between $13 and $16 and is often priced higher than not only paperback, but hardcover as well. What's the advantage of buying the ebook that you can't lend to a friend, resell or use as a doorstop in the beach house.
The phenomenon of new publishing, but it would be better to call it "new content" does not only concern the book industry. Cinema and television have also been invested by the contents of the new publishing industry. The Martian, Ridley Scott's film, was based on Andy Weir's self-published novel, Still Alice, which earned Julianne Moore a well-deserved Oscar, is based on the novel of the same name by neuroscientist Lisa Genova who self-published it in 2007. The same happened for the Prophecy of Celestine and Eragon. The television series Wayward Pines was based on Blake Crouch's self-published trilogy of the same name.
Performance of some self-published titles
50 Shades of gray
Copies sold: 125 million
Film revenue: $166,1 million
Survivor-The Martian
Copies sold: 23 million
Film revenue: $228,4 million
Still Alice
Copies sold: 2,6 million
Film revenue: $18,7 million
Departure
Copies sold: 1 million
Film in preparation
Wayward Pines
Copies sold: 1 million
Fox TV series with Matt Damon
The doubling of the book market
In 2016, Amazon published 4 million digital titles of which 40 percent are from self-published authors. In 2011, digital titles distributed by the Kindle Store were just 600. A leap that is unbelievable. According to AuthorEarnings - a resource that monitors the Kindle Store - self-published titles are worth 25% of all ebooks sold by Amazon, which receives a total of 2,5 billion dollars from the digital channel. If we also consider the value generated by Amazon Publishing (Amazon's publishing house), which is close to 400 million dollars, and the 500 million revenues generated by books without ISBNs, new publishing exceeds one and a half billion dollars. A billion and a half means that it is worth half of the entire Italian book industry. In turn, Amazon is worth 80% of the overall e-book market. 40% is due to the management of Amazon, 40% is due to the lie of the managers of the big publishing houses.
What does this mean? It means that there is no longer a single book market, but there are two and they travel in parallel. The number one market, the classic one, continues to be dominated by traditional publishers and is centered on books and bookshop sales which are defended and shielded from the onslaught of ebooks, which are experienced by publishers in the same way Estonians experience Putin. The other market, brand new, is made exclusively of ebooks and is driven by Amazon and the KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) program. This is digital content sold at a heavily discounted price compared to content produced by traditional publishers.
The services that flourished around the new market
Many initiatives have grown up around the brand new book industry headed by Amazon's Kindle Store aimed at providing services and advice to authors and publishers who intend to operate on this specific channel, in a prominent way. Below we give an account of some of these initiatives which in the United States have become a point of reference for thousands of writers and publishers.
Reedsy. com. It is a platform that gives access to the profiles of 500 book publishing professionals (editors, cover designers, marketers) and can manage proposals, relationships between authors and these professionals, estimates and economic transactions. The performance of the professionals can be commented and evaluated by the buyer. The platform already has 1300 editorial productions made possible by its intermediation.
Girl Friday Productions. It's a Seattle company of 25 people who all come from traditional publishing backgrounds. It offers a complete service ranging from text editing to market positioning of new publishing. A package that includes editing, design, media strategy and promotion costs between $10 and $30.
Wattpad. It is an online resource that connects authors to readers and helps the first to create a fan base that can also intervene in the development of an editorial project. The author publishes the individual chapters and receives feedback from readers which allows him to fine-tune the plot and characters. This is the technique that EL James used in the beginning to verify the matching of his shades of gray. Anna Todd's After series has garnered a million readers on Wattpad.
Smashowords, Riffle Books, BookBaby, Bookhub, Lulu and other online resources give access to a community of avid readers and also offer distribution service on major platforms such as Amazon. BookFunnel, created by fantasy novelist Damon Courtney, helps authors distribute free digital copies of their book to build a reader base. The 3000 independent authors who have turned to this service make a total of half a million downloads a month with an investment of between 20 and 100 dollars.
Ingram, the largest book distributor in the United States, has created a special program for self-publishers and independent publishers. This program is called Spark self-publishing and gives access to 39 physical outlets. EverAfter Romance does the same for romance novels and in one year has amassed (that's the word) a catalog of thousands of romance titles that brings in over a million dollars. Scott Waxman, CEO of EverAfter, said the authors' question was "astonishing".
Some of these services, not those mentioned in any case, do not always help the authors or correspond to their expectations. In the good tradition of what used to be the Vanity Press, some services have a predatory nature and tend to take advantage of the willingness of eager authors to publish. They tend to charge high commissions (up to $5) and keep large portions of royalties (up to 40%) in exchange for simply submitting the title to the big platforms.
Migrants from the "old" publishing to the "new"
Many literary agencies representing both established and new authors are starting to turn to new publishing. Either because the offer greatly exceeds the demand for titles and authors by traditional publishing, or because the latter tends to shy away from any unplanned risk. Novice authors of undoubted talent are struggling to find space in traditional publishing which appears increasingly driven by big names and celebrities. Some major agencies like Curtis Brown, IPSO Books, Nelson Agency are starting to direct their clients towards self-publishing. In exchange for a small percentage they offer to handle the publishing process and marketing.
Traditional publishers are trying to reach the pool of writers looking for publication with initiatives, even original ones, in their conception. Unbound in the UK and Inkshares in California are two examples. Unbound is a sort of book crowdfunding. Inkshares organizes reader surveys to verify the commercial potential of a book and therefore invest in it. The community of Inkshares readers reaches 100 members and therefore it is something from which something indicative can arise. Inkshares' policy is this: if a project or idea manages to collect more than 750 orders, the content will be published. In this case, Inkshares takes care of the entire production process of the title, marketing, advertising and even its possible reduction to film. Authors who pass the test receive a 35% royalty. In just a few years, Inkshares raised $2 million from investors, produced 30 books and 5 films, and made $5 million in revenue. Adam Jack Gomolin, co-founder of Inkshares, thus describes its business model “We need a smarter filter for new voices”.
And so after the mass media era, power returns to its sources: to authors and readers. The publisher will only have to hold the snot. Unless the publisher evolves into a "smarter filter". But a new generation is really needed here.
