Kindle

Why review? Then again, why even bother publishing?

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Over the past several months – say, six or so – I have been reading an inordinate amount as I’ve been ramping up my production schedule. Not that I’ve met it, but I’ve been trying. Several almost complete works just waiting for that semi-final edit, two new stories from my Other Identity swirling around, and here I am in Paris struggling with what feels like a covid cough – oh, wait! Covid doesn’t exist any more … at least nobody tests for it and a whole plane load of coughing passengers on their way from Singapore (nobody masked) was just due to general unspecified viruses. Anyway when I finally called the brilliant SOS Medicins service – can you believe a doctor does a home visit at 11 at night after being called just an hour before ?- he didn’t express any interest in speculating about viral sources and was just very reassuring about cough mixture and the benefits of Paracetomol.

So, back to reading. As part of the effort to better define what ‘genre’ I am writing in, I have been gulping down all kinds of stuff. I joined Kindle Unlimited so I could read lots of books of completely unknown quality really quickly and send them back if I couldn’t stand them. And I did send back a lot. You can only have twelve out at one time. I was sending back two a day at one point. The contemporary writing and reading market is so peculiar. I discovered genres I could never have dreamt up. Well, maybe they are subgenres, whatever. Tentacle Aliens was pretty bizarre.

Their technical identity on Amazon is:
Tentacle Aliens and Monsters Erotic Short Stories

Rita Indiana’s was the best. And to be fair, her book is not developed through the Amazon ecosystem, being published as an actual book, ie a printed volume, by that excellent British publisher And Other Stories. Check them out!

Here’s what Rita’s blurb says: Plucked from her life on the streets of post-apocalyptic Santo Domingo, young maid Acilde Figueroa finds herself at the heart of a Santería prophecy: only she can travel back in time and save the ocean – and humanity – from disaster. But first she must become the man she always was – with the help of a sacred anemone. Tentacle is an electric novel with a big appetite and a brave vision, plunging headfirst into questions of climate change, technology, Yoruba ritual, queer politics, poverty, sex, colonialism and contemporary art. Bursting with punk energy and lyricism, it’s a restless, addictive trip: The Tempest meets the telenovela.

There are others which are just barely disguised erotica. Even some of these weren’t bad.

I quite enjoyed

Nepenthe: A Tentacle Alien Space Fantasy (We Are Nepenthe Book 1)

by Octavia Hyde

I was cross that she had preempted my intended use of the name Nepenthe as a sub-division of Blackwing Press for experimental and off-the-wall writing. In the light of all this, I have cancelled Nepenthe Books as a concept altogether now. It seems far too tame, given what is out there already.

Moving on from Tentacles, I found that many male writers (at least persons writing under sturdy male-identified names) have been writing about catastrophic colonies on Mars or elsewhere in a decaying universe. Lots of (ditto) girl-sounding people are writing filth about billionaires and dom/sub desires, Mafia romances and Reverse Harem (that is when one woman has three or more men living/playing with her, some of them are bikies and some are cowboys, take your pick).

Paying special heed to post-apocalyptic themes I found a couple of (I think) young players writing not bad series. I downloaded a couple of Kyla Stone’s stories and followed on her blog-site and she was doing a very good marketing job. Sadly I just got completely bored with the stories which all seemed the same. Another was a New Zealand writer who seemed appealing when I watched her on one of the many talk programs run by one of the various online “how to be an author” groups, but I lost interest after realising that although she seemed like a very nice young lady, what she was writing was just too horrible for me.

So these are low-budget Kindle ebooks designed for the Amazon ecosystem. In most cases I didn’t have any compunction about returning the books with only a few pages read. (On Kindle Unlimited the author is paid according to how many pages are read). In a couple of others I could sense a good writer struggling to come out. One in particular was writtten by a Melbourne person (girl/woman self-presentation) and it was very well written and quite gripping in places although the key plot element was obvious from early on and in my view rather ridiculous. I finished it, and for a brief moment considered writing a proper actual review with real words – as against the silly five stars which now appear at the end of each Amazon ebook, uselessly as far as I can see – I never ever click them. But I hesitated. It’s a slippery slope.

When Amazon Kindle was first a thing you had to buy the books you wanted to read and download them onto an early-generation e-reader, nothing else worked other than your actual computer. Take a look at one of the early Kindle versions here:

https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/2010-kindle-keyboard-gettyimages-137403263.jpg

You couldn’t put them on your IPhone or on an I-Pad and there was no such thing as Kobo or Apple Books. I felt very motivated to write reviews of at least some of the books I read. I love to read a well-crafted and considered review, and enjoyed the challenge of writing them myself. I knew an author’s success depended to a great extent on what the reviews said, and as a reader myself I read at least a good selection of reviews, both positive and negative. One’s reviewing name is not one’s own name, so there was some protection of identity when you didn’t like something. I felt it was a kind of community thing, to share views with others. I reviewed certain author’s books without fail. Then there was Goodreads, which at some point was taken over by Amazon, and that became overwhelming, so I stopped using it altogether, although they still send me emails all the time.

I don’t know when it dawned on me that the whole review process had become distorted and corrupt. Review-farming was a thing. Somehow authors could pay money – a lot of money, maybe hundreds of dollars – to have their books reviewed by a group of people who apparently got some reward for reviewing them, although I never knew how that worked, or how it met Amazon’s terms of service. The system became hyper-alert to reviews from anyone even vaguely connected to the author, relative, friend, Facebook contact, whatever and those reviews were banned. Other anonymous people however were free to say whatever they liked and post one star reviews because the book was delivered late, or was about something they hadn’t expected because obviously they hadn’t read the blurb.

Now I don’t review at all. I often feel I would like to comment on books I really like, or make suggestions to authors about something they could do to strengthen the work, or whatever. But I know now that the majority of successful Amazon authors are turning out books once every couple of months. Some are using ghost writers. Others treat writing as a kind of supermarket shelf-stocking – each book a basic product fitting a particular genre run through one or more editing programs to check for grammar and spelling, off to a human editor perhaps, covers designed strictly by genre convention which somehow everyone understands, and book is “launched” with money lavished on Amazon and/or Facebook ads and now Tik-Tok reels three times a day. Why bother reviewing? It would be like reviewing cans of identical soup. And authors are devastated if the reviews they do get are not five-star.

The whole reviewing scene is a good topic for another post, but in the meantime I just want to get on with writing my new books and editing the ones patiently waiting to appear.

But then I think, why bother? There are 32.8 million published titles on Amazon now. I can’t even work out what genre I am writing in. Some is memoir, yes, and maybe some is literary fiction. The new stuff is something else again. I don’t plan to spend money on Amazon ads, or Facebook ads. I can see most of my books will appeal mainly to “classic” readers, that is, women of a certain age who buy books in book-shops and go to literary events and festivals, but they don’t buy independently published print-on-demand books and they all hate Amazon. All I can be sure of is that the books I have written will exist in print copies in a few libraries and on a few personal bookshelves. I have lost so much confidence in the whole enterprise it is hard to force myself to keep going, and I certainly don’t intend to waste any time reviewing other writers’ books even though I keep on itching to do so.

Revolutionary Baby: views and reviews

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Having a kind of fun experimenting with different ways to let people know this book is out now and available to buy as a paperback or download as an e-book. Experimented with making reels or vdos using the images above which were AI generated. Seems lie MP4s using AI images on Canva won’t download to Instagram. No idea why.

Turns out also that Amazon reviews written by readers in the UK don’t show up on the Amazon pages for other Amazon sites. To get a review to show up on Amazon.com it needs to be loaded by someone in the US using a .com account, The whole Amazon ecosystem is so US focussed. I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised, there isn’t anywhere else in the world really. I don’t think my video can be posted here either, but I’ll give it a try.

Feeling super frustrated about the use of social media as it is now. Used to be people following you saw whatever you posted. Now algorithms determine everything and each individual gets things the algorithm thinks they want. Presumably this is to encourage paid advertising on the social sites, which has now become a deluge. There doesn’t seem to be any community or collective environment left any more except in Groups, and there you get kicked out if you try to “advertise” without a commercial account. The immutable logic of the system forces everyone into a straitjacket with $$$$$$$ signs on all sides.

Reviews can be posted on websites, but then only those following the website already can see them. But if you’d like to post a review anyway, positive or otherwise, use the Contact form on this site and I’ll put it up on the Book page.

Experiments in AI: A+ Content files for Revolutionary Baby on KDP: the Thumbnail Narrative.

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Although I share the general anxiety in the publishing world about the impact of AI, I have to say experimenting with AI images has been rewarding. Amazon’s KDP allows authors/publishers to include quite expansive materials on their book pages. The question is, what to use as the basis for the content?

When the book is a collection of short stories, like Revolutionary Baby, this give an opportunity to give some visual clues as to what some of the stories are about. Brief text-based summaries on the back of the book amount to not much more tha a Table of Contents. In an experimental spirit, I spent a lot of time this week seeing what I could come up with to give some better visual presentation of the narratives. The A+ content also allows the creation of one kind of module with text to go with a set of images, so that is what I have submitted. Whether or not it is accepted is another matter.

Meawhile, here are the three examples I am hoping to use as the visual clues on the book page. They seem to have transferred well using the preferred pixel size recommended by KDP.

If it works out on the Amazon book page each image will have a brief text below it. I chose to paraphrase some of the actual writing from the stories. Some of it could be used verbatim but with condensation and re-expression it became a lot better. It called for a different kind of editing.

Now to find some other ways to circulate these thumbnail narratives.

Fake Classics Out of Copyright: Bot-writing Jack London

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I read all kind of books all the time but this one was even more of an outlier than usual. I won’t go into why but I wanted to read the original text of Jack London’s The People of the Abyss, about life in the slums of East London in the early 1900s. Jack London is one of those writers who people over fifty think they might have heard of. His books were mostly published between 1903 and 1914, and are remarkable for being based on the author’s first hand research in the places he wrote about. He is an early populist anthropologist who mostly used his fact for fiction.  People loved his sensationalist stories serialised in newspapers and later published as books. Probably his best known is The Call of the Wild (1903). London spent over a year living in the Yukon to research his story. Set during the 1890s Klondike gold rush its central character is a dog named Buck. Buck was stolen from his comfortable home and forced to become a sled dog in Alaska.

First edition cover of The Call of the Wild, New York, Macmillan Company, 1903. cover art by Paul Bransom (1885-1979) or possibly Charles Bull (1874-1932) –

I don’t recall reading this book as a child but it would have been right up my alley. It certainly has echoes in my own novelette Suburban Gigolo, about a cat stolen from his home in Sydney’s Inner West in order to become a Facebook model. Sadly it’s never had the popularity of The Call of the Wild but you can order it from Amazon.

Remember if you are in Australia you need to order from the amazon.com.au site: see brief extract and link at the end of this post.

I would like to write more about Jack London but that will have to wait. This post is about what I found when I tried to locate The People of the Abyss online. Like The Call of the Wild it is out of copyright (1923 is the current cut-off) and early editions are rare and expensive. But I thought someone might have rescued it so off to Amazon I went and there I found several editions mostly with el cheapo dodgy covers. Luckily I used the Look Inside feature and discovered that this book which seemed to be Jack London’s was a fake.  I think it has been translated from some other language into English by a bot (automated translation program) and some enterprising scammer(s) have put it on sale for around $5.00. It is almost completely unreadable. Here is a sample sentence from near the beginning of the book:

“And they waved their palms vaguely inside the route where the sun on rare activities can be visible to upward thrust”.

Yes, I agree there is a certain beauty and poetic wonder to be had from reading these bot translations. It is another form of emerging literature, perhaps. But that’s not what one expects when paying $5 for a Kindle download of an English-language classic. There is no publisher credited. I then discovered the whole original text is available for free from Project Gutenberg.

I’ve already suggested to Amazon that this book should be taken down at once. It is a horrible misrepresentation of an important original text. If there is any way of checking on these republications of out-of-print works it should be implemented immediately. I imagine Amazon and other e-book publishers/distributors will be flooded by this kind of rip-off as more and more books come out of copyright. In the meanwhile, make sure to check the text before you hit the Pay button.

POSTSCRIPT: (6th June 2020) A couple of days after sending a review notice to Amazon I discovered that the offending text was no longer available there. But there were several other versions and as I started to check them it was apparent that some were also mock-ups or distorted versions of the original text, each issued under a different cover, none credited with publishers. The flood of fakes and distortions makes it almost impossible for a purchaser to know what they are buying.

Buy this version

There is one genuine reproduction of the original text with notes and wonderful photographic illustrations, for $A3.95, and it is a real bargain. Here are a couple of images from the book. Apparently Jack London himself took his own photographs. He was even more of a pioneering ethnographer than I originally imagined.

Locals of East London
Not sure what this image refers to: needs closer reading/research
Two drunken women fighting: I am sure this is a staged photo
An engraving – possibly used for a newspaper article based on an original Jack London photograph
Here’s the link for Australian buyers: a bargain at A$1.35
https://www.amazon.com.au/Suburban-Gigolo-Bad-Around-Town-ebook/dp/B071FY6V4Z/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=suburban+gigolo&qid=1591404965&s=digital-text&sr=1-1

Kindle Create: how much easier can it get?

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When I first started learning how to publish on Kindle it was such a struggle. I wrote quickly and fluently, I was a great typist and could use Word with my eyes shut, but the next steps – getting the manuscript right for the various platforms, understanding how to format, what was involved in covers – not to mention ISBNs and uploading and getting manuscripts to conform to arcane and mysterious requirements proved baffling, frustrating and humbling. I was just getting the hang of it when life threw a curved ball and the almost finished books had to languish for most of 2018. Back in action now and I discover everything has suddenly got so much easier. Ingram Spark are falling over backwards now to help the self-publishing author (as well as those micropublishing through their own companies), there are many new cover services available, new international players have appeared in unexpected places (Italy, Finland!), Draft2Digital is flourishing and best of all (for Mac users) Vellum came along with fantastic options for interior designing and trying-out on different platforms.

Amazon closed down Create Space, that was a surprise, and started its own print arm, which didn’t help Australian authors since there was no way to get printed books to Australia and Amazon wasn’t planning to print them here. Local readers in Australia are still wedded to print books and the local publishers/booksellers/reviewers are resolutely set on ignoring self-publishers, so without a print book presence of some kind the Australian market is very hard to reach.

But never mind, Ingram Spark is a very good alternative, prints in Melbourne and has great international distribution.  The print version of my experimental children’s book (The Priceless Princess) can be ordered now through Book Depository, Angus and Robertson and others. It is also available in print from Amazon, although nobody in the US is buying it.

But even with all the alternatives, publishing on Kindle remains a necessity although the market is now so hugely competitive. The good old .mobi file was easy enough to produce but it generally looked pretty ordinary and the placement of images was a pain.  BUT today Amazon announces a new service called Kindle Create. Seems to have purloined some of the best features of Vellum, for no cost. So I’m going to have a go with it for my two books of short stories, ready to come out early next year, although I’ll still get epub and pdf versions for Ingram Spark made through Vellum. I feel like I might be onto it at last.

I guess the only thing easier would be if Amazon wrote your books for you. Ghostwriting is already a big business – celebrities and rappers use ghostwriters all the time. But if Amazon could guarantee a good book written from your plot outline, and then marketed it where the old “Other Purchases” used to be, it would raise the career of writing to a whole new level.

How do you get this gig?

Paid Reviews? Who knew?

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Recently my small publication company had offers from several sources to arrange reviews for its Kindle books for an unspecified price. “At least forty reviews” one promised. This is unconscionable. Reviews have become a major element in the success or otherwise of Kindle books, especially those of otherwise unknown authors. I’ve often wondered at the frequently inane and disconnected reviews that turn up for many new titles giving them five stars. Obviously these are not validated purchasers although who knows? When books only cost 99 cents it may work out financially in the end to get the recruited reviewers to buy the books while the author/publisher shells out however much they pay to the review company. No wonder there is so much rubbish around. But given the difficulties now with getting in front of readers’ eyes – why on earth Amazon decided to give up on the “Also Boughts” – it’s not surprising that people will come up with scams of various kinds. Book reviewing itself is a weird business. Check out the comments below by TIME reviewer Lev Grossman from a while back.

Reviewing before Kindle
Confessions of (Another) Book Reviewer
Beyond Good and Awful: Literary Value in the Age of the Amazon Review

A two-speed economy: How traditional publishers are benefiting from Amazon.

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I’ve mentioned before the way Amazon publication has entered new territory since the Big Five managed to get their own way about e-book pricing. It’s become increasingly apparent that conventional publishers have worked out how the maximise their gains from e-books and distributors, and while still bemoaning their existence have seized on the new opportunities now available.

There is no doubt that a traditional publishing deal remains the aim of most writers. Other than genre fiction of a certain kind (explicit erotica, shape-shifters, Space Opera romance and so on) every serious writer still wants a deal with a “real” publisher. But a lot of readers don’t want to buy physical books, and want to buy e-books online.

Now the traditional publishers have worked out that they can offer e-books at the same time as they publish print books, and preserve the powerful traditional ecosystem. By ensuring the price of the e-book version is not far from the print version (which may indeed be available in bookshops and will receive traditional marketing, recognition and publicity) they can make profits from e-books which are virtually cost-free since they only need to prepare the files once, there are no publication costs, distribution costs, warehousing costs or any other costs to speak of. The writers meanwhile have presumably signed contracts for the standard royalties, like 10% or whatever, and the publishers are pocketing the difference. And keeping the e-book costs high for the readers.

So a newly published book, like Liane Moriarty’s Nine Perfect Strangers (2018) is selling on Kindle for $14.99 and in paperback on Amazon.au for $16.00.  And Sydney-based author Shirley Barrett’s The Bus on Thursday (2018) – a most unusual read about a woman who has breast cancer by an author who learns that she does in fact have breast cancer after she has finished writing the book – is published by well-known Australian publisher Allen and Unwin on Kindle for $14.99 and in paperback at $22.99. I have no idea whether these authors have made special royalty deals with their publishers regarding the e-book version, maybe they have and good luck to them.

This process is pushing the distinction between self-published books and books from traditional publishers further and further apart, so most indie books on Kindle are $2.99 or even less and the trad pub books are now well above $10.00.  Do readers know, or care? Well, they probably don’t care about that, as such, but they DO get to hear about the books because the publishers have established methods of publicity which benefit the e-book sales in a way that the randomised chaos of Amazon Kindle at present cannot equal. So the traditional publisher sells lots and lots of e-books but makes the reader pay almost as much as they would for a paperback even though they don’t get to actually “own” the book, can’t lend it to anyone or do anything else with it. But somehow still think they are getting a good deal because it costs less than the paperback they saw in the store.

What a mess it has become. I wish some clever statistical analysis was going on right now to clarify what the effects of all this are. You can glean a bit from services like Alex Newton’s K-Lytics and Data Guy at the Author Earnings Report, but I haven’t found anyone who is tackling the divergent effects of the way traditional publishers are now using the e-book market to enhance their reach while re-consolidating their influence over publishing and pushing independent authors back down to where they think they belong. Is genuine independent publishing doomed? Does anyone know of any updates on this?

Amazon creates NoSpace for Australian authors: Ingram Spark to the rescue?

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In my previous post I mentioned the problems Australian authors are having under the new KDP publication model. I wanted to offer a couple of observations based on personal experience.

I have used KDP, CreateSpace and Ingram Spark in my experiments with publishing to date. I found Ingram Spark quite problematic – this was a couple of years ago – it didn’t seem at all friendly and had difficult protocols which had to be followed exactly for it to work successfully. IS charged a set-up fee (unlike CreateSpace/KDP) and you had to re-pay every time you changed anything eg because of errors you discovered only after the first files had been set up. I had problems with a colour shift in one of my covers and when I asked IS why this was so they were completely unhelpful, and didn’t want to engage in any discussion about it. They said the problem was in my files, but they came out perfectly on Create Space. If you have published ANYTHING on Kindle in the previous year, IS cannot distribute to Kindle, ditto Apple. There were heaps of others to whom they distributed though, and this became important when I realized that Australian readers could order my books through sellers like Book Depository and Angus and Robertson online. Booksellers could, if they wished, order them too. Amazon didn’t offer anything like it and seemed to have no Australian outlets. If someone in Australia wanted to buy a print copy through Amazon they had to pay a huge postage fee.

Now Australian readers can’t even buy from the US site. If they want a print copy of a book by an Australian author who has published with Amazon they have to order from the Australian site and pay the A$ price and the postage from the US as well. What’s worse for authors, they can’t access their own books for review copies or place bulk orders as they used to be able to do from CreateSpace. So the need for an alternative becomes compelling.

Ingram Spark has printing facilities in Australia, in Melbourne to be precise. So they can print one copy, or multiples, and ship them to the author directly. Their printing costs are higher in some cases than CreateSpace used to be, but having local access more than compensates. Ingram Spark seems to be making a much more active effort to engage with the self-publishing community. If you belong to the Alliance of Independent Authors IS was offering free set-up, for instance. Not sure if that is still the case, but will find out in a few weeks when I set up two of my new publications and will report back.

Now to the option of local printing. I have checked out two Sydney-based printers and am about to see what a service in my local regional area can do. This is not old-time offset printing, but Print on Demand suitable for short runs. One printer offered quick service and lovely-quality print (including good quality covers based on the CreateSpace files I provided) but the cost was so far in excess of what IS or CreateSpace offered and you had to arrange your own pick-up and obviously storage. Another couldn’t work with the type of files I had at all and said they weren’t going to be compatible with their machines.

Once you go to the commercial printing universe you are in a world of pain. Here’s why: https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/58921/which-file-format-is-best-for-printing

Printers have their own expectations and facilities. I had a professional designer do both interior layout and covers for my previous books but local printers still had problems. Now I’m looking at using either Pressbooks or Vellum for the interiors and getting a professional designer for the covers. Whether this would work with the local printer, we shall see. Anyway, if you do go the local printer route, you have to be able to pick up and store your books, and forward/deliver them to the customer. And charge a much higher price. I am thinking of doing some locally printed good quality paperbacks for my own sales (through the website and maybe some local bookshops) as well as using Ingram Spark AND KDP. Steep learning curves all around.

Trads vs. Indies: Will This War Ever End?

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Reposted: Traditional publishing and the issue of editing – we need to look more closely at this.

The Let's Play Ball Blog

0601161425Traditional publishers will probably never embrace independent authors as equals. They will be loath to admit that the terms of engagement in this ongoing battle are changing, that the combatants are becoming more equal, and that some authors even find a way to go “hybrid.” It’s becoming increasingly clear that the trads are losing the high ground they once held in the area of editorial standards.

Examples of bad editing crop up more and more in the traditional world. For example, there are few authors more successful at traditional publishing than Anne Rice. She also specializes in the hottest subjects in fiction, vampires and werewolves. Yet Floyd Orr, editor of the long-running review site PODBRAM, and a rabid Rice fan, reports: “Anne Rice’s 34th book contains more errors than I have ever seen in a top-selling, traditionally published hardback! There are errors of every kind: repeated common words, misused spellings…

View original post 922 more words

Is there really a future for independent publishing in Australia?

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Ever get the feeling that independent publishing, which promised so much, is heading down the vortex, especially for Australian authors? When it all started rolling it seemed like writers would be able to reach readers without all the intermediaries deciding who and what would be allowed through the hallowed gates of author-dom.

selfpub diagram wikiIt looked as if new technology would link writers and readers all over the world and open up the artificial geographic zones which for half a century had been creating unnecessary boundaries around the best new writing. Readers were forced to pay absurdly high prices in some areas, including Australia, to accommodate the outdated business model. You might have thought the response would have been to change the business model, but no, that didn’t happen, and now things seem to be in some kind of weird spiral.

In the US E-books are still selling, and selling well. In number they far outweigh trad pub titles, and just recently they have superseded print books in dollar value. Of course many of these sales are for traditionally published books from established publishers, who bring out an e-book edition along with their print editions. It is very hard to get accurate figures separating the different market components out.

US eBook_Sales_to_Surpass_Printed_Book_Sales_in_2017_n

When Indie publishing took hold, a network of new support mechanisms evolved to help authors bring their work to an eager public. Traditional publishers went on doing exactly as they had been doing (but added in e-book versions) and everyone else was free to try things out in all kinds of ways while Amazon  provided the all-important technological platform.

For a while Amazon set the prices of the e-books from the traditional publishers. But after a legal case spear-headed by global giant Hachette Amazon was forced to raise the prices of the e-book versions  so they did not  compete with print books: take a look at the price box next to the Big Five published book you want to buy on your Amazon site and you will see “The price was set by the publishers”. This has pushed e-book prices higher for “good” books from all the global players who have eaten up the smaller niche publishers at least in the English-language market.

BigFivePublishers

Meanwhile millions of other books are left wallowing about at the lowest possible end of the price scale in the hope that someone, anyone, will buy a copy. The unregulated indie market has turned out to be a ghastly place full of bad writing, creepy fantasies, idiotic space-nonsense, buff six-packs and bizarre arrays of erotica. There are many notable exceptions, of course, but anyone who takes a close look at what is going on in the Amazon indie market better not be a serious reader who thinks books have something to do with improving society and culture.

In Australia, the e-book revolution hardy took hold although Australians are known as early adopters of new technologies. Try asking around among friends and workmates and see how many actually have and use a Kindle. The answer, if you are an indie author, is super-depressing. It seems everyone longs for the olden days.

old Angus and Robertson

But there’s more to it than persistent nostalgia. It’s not just that people like going to physical bookshops, or buying physical books (often as presents for others), it’s that the guardians of Australian culture mounted an incredibly successful campaign against Amazon among booklovers. They were readily convinced that anything coming out of a corporate US giant like Amazon was automatically going to be a Bad Thing. This impression was shored up among the writers’ groups, in publishing circles, among academics and general literati, the local press, the network of book clubs and whatever other areas of public communication had anything at all to say about books and writing. Indie authors did not appear at Writer’s Festivals. Nobody mentioned them on the TV book shows (all now defunct); everybody interested in books and writing in Australia knew that good writing only appeared through a reputable publisher. The books by Australian authors hailed by the literati sold in modest to low numbers. Books written by Australian indie authors had to succeed in the US market, or not at all. There has never been an identifiable market for Australian independent authors in Australia.

Now things are even worse. Amazon won’t let Australians buy e-books – or any books for that matter – from it’s American site. This is supposedly because the Australian government didn’t like it that e-books were being bought by Australians who weren’t paying GST on them. Now the reader is forced back to the .au site, no option. Add the GST to the cost of the e-book and it looks a lot more expensive than when it was $2.99 on the US site. Previously, readers who wanted to order a print version could do so from the US site and pay horrendous postage. It seems that hardcover versions of Big Five published books are available through the Australian site, but still have to be sent at a high postage rate from the US. So guess what? You might as well buy a print copy of the book from your local bookshop, or by ordering online. Who needs Kindles and e-books after all? Somehow all this seems to have shored up the ultra-conservative elements in the Australian book world.

E-book author earnings are still very substantial, and when you consider that many authors identify themselves with a self-managed publishing imprint, the result is even more impressive. But of course this is happening in the US, not in Australia.

ebook-author-earnings-1m-201605

Australian authors often made print versions through CreateSpace and ordered fifty or a hundred or whatever copies to distribute themselves in Australia, sell through their own website or send out as freebies. Now CreateSpace has closed down and everyone is supposed to use KDP for their print books. But nobody, not even the author, can order print books from their US-based Amazon account, and Amazon is not going to be printing books in Australia anytime soon. You can’t even order a proof copy of your new e-book from KDP, apparently, because that would involve sending it at the US price. I believe this issue is currently being looked at by Amazon, but the bulk print copies will never be available again. So it’s back to the Australian traditional publishers.tradpub cartoon

Several correspondents have asked why authors don’t just have their own books printed locally, instead of worrying about the whole Amazon/e-book experience? Well, there are three good reasons. Firstly, local printers quote for a paperback version around two-three times the cost CreateSpace used to be able to supply them at, even with shipping from the US. They can look a lot better with much nicer paper but the price needs to be set very high if the bookseller gets the 40-50% discount they expect. The author may finish up getting even less than the miserable payout from a book priced at $2.99 on Amazon. Second, local bookshops are very reluctant to stock books from independent authors unless there is some local reason to do so – like a book about riding bicycles along back paths here in the Blue Mountains, which sells well from just two or three bookshops. The author supplies the copies personally when the bookshops run out. But if you are trying to sell more widely it means you have to keep stocks of your printed books somewhere – in your garage, or in your bedroom, or in a warehouse-type space, then you have to post or send or courier copies to whoever wants them, then pick them up again if they aren’t sold.

There is no simple answer, obviously.

BTW I  want to thank Anna Castleton for her recent comment (August 31st) which prompted me to write this post sooner rather than later. I also should mention that my e-books, such as they are to date, have been illustrated and cover-designed and the interiors formatted by a well-regarded professional (in Mexico, as it happens) and the colour shift problems  I had with my children’s book The Priceless Princess when print copies were made on Ingram Spark were the result of the Ingram Spark presses not “reading” the PDF files correctly.  Ingram Spark seems much more responsive these days and  is making a significant push into the space being vacated by Amazon. And it prints in Melbourne.  More on this in a later post.