Merge and be Damned: Penguin and Random House

Apologies to Pingu and Spongebob SquarePants

News today that the Penguin and Random House merger is definitely on. If reports are accurate, the Owners of Random House (The international media group based in Germany, Bertelsmann) will own 53%, with Pearson (the US owner of Penguin) left with 47%.

In the month of Microsoft's launch of their Surface tablet and Apple's new iPad Mini, for the self-publisher the merger is worth noting because it shows the power of internet retail, and the strength of the world beyond the traditional publisher. This merger is a straightforward attempt to survive in a tough High Street climate where the legacy publishing houses struggle with strategies and structures built for a bricks and mortar age. 

In the world of print, change is slow because although, at its best, the industry carefully curates its output, in the end, business is business so Pearson and Bertelsmann need to make a profit in an environment that is changing more rapidly than at any time over the last 100 years. The last two years alone have seen astonishing growth in digital sales, reflecting the swift change in consumer habits represented by ipads, tablets and smartphones. It’s hard for the bigger publishers to keep up but the figures tell the story (information from The Wall Street Journal’s Market Watch and Bloomberg Business Week):

• The new merged entity, Penguin Random, will turnover 3 billion USD
• Pearson annual net sales in 2011 were 5.88 billion up from  5.14 billion in 2009
• For Barnes and Noble (the largest book chain in the world) turnover was 7 bn in 2011, up from 5.1 bn in 2009.

These appear to be significant numbers, and in the contained world of publishing, they are the biggest fish in the pond. But compare them to the broader, modern phenomenon that is the Internet, and they don't look so mighty:

• Amazon annual sales in 2011 were 48 billion, up from 24 billion in 2009
• Google achieved 37 billion in 2011, 23 billion in 2009

This is the market that controls access to the hallowed consumer.

Even more extreme, are two manufacturers on whose mobile devices the internet retailers rely:

• Samsung Electronics sales were 150 billion in 2011, 124 billion in 2009
• Apple reached 108 billion in 2011, up from 42 billion in 2009

For the self-publisher this is good news: as the market grows online so the opportunities grow. Promoting single titles into Amazon, Nook and Apple has never been easier (this is the liberated world of self-publishing). Quality matters, good editing matters, but ultimately the role of the bigger traditional publisher (whatever their size), so reliant on big sales to cover the big advances for the big celebrity authors, is rapidly diminishing for a great many authors trying to maximise their own impact online. 

Coming Next: Amazon Direct or Traditional Publisher?

How to Self-Publish: Madison McGraw

Have just come back from Bookexpo in New York and am writing a blogpost about how slick and swift Amazon Kindle Publishing is, just after a post about greedy publishers. Well, here's Madison McGraw, a voice from today's world, please take a few moments to listen. It made me laugh at the pomposity of my own industry!

Coming Soon: How to Publish: Amazon KDP and How to Publish on the Nook

Self-Publish Your eBook. Reason #2

Bookshops groaning with Books.

There’s never been a better time to self-publish your own ebook. There are so many ways to promote your books through social media, publish them through major online retailers and make them available to libraries. And it cuts away at the monopoly of the big High Street retailers.

So what’s wrong with the big High Street retailers, Barnes and Noble in the US, or Indigo in Canada, or Waterstones in the UK? 

Well, not much really, except that they are limited by the size of their stores and the flexibility, or otherwise, of their central buying teams. These venerable institutions are in terminal decline because they simply cannot represent the scale of opportunity afforded online to the consumer. And, to make it worse, in an attempt to compete with the internet they are trying to reinvent themselves with non-book items —  fluffy toys, stationery — and so reducing the amount of already limited space available to books. A book store with 40,000-50,000 books used to be a reasonably typical size. This sounds like a large number, but with the publishing industry regularly pumping out over 150,000 new titles and reissues every year, you can see the problem. And Amazon has around 1.8 million books available.

Publishers, be they the powerhouses of Penguin, HarperCollins and Random or the plethora of indie outfits, all have a tough time selling their books into the limited space on the shelves of the big retailers. And they also sell to supermarkets, garden centres, chain stores etc, and these retailers have even less space for books.

So, as a self-publishing author, using Createspace, or Smashwords, or Lulu, or making and uploading yourself to Amazon, Apple, B&N’s Nook and Kobo, you will control over your own selling space. You can build on it and promote it. You can let it grow at a pace that suits you, you can publish one book every two years or five every other month. It’s your choice, not someone else’s, and, as long as you create something that’s professional and promotable, you will be the prime beneficiary.

And did I mention that you can change the price of your own book? Or alter the cover, or update the book without having to wait for the next print-run? Well, that’s for another post!

Coming Soon: Do You Need an Agent? and How do I Find a Good Proofreader?

Easy Steps to eBook Success

Over the next few weeks I'll be looking at the entire process of creating and publishing your own ebook. This will cover several key elements:

1. Writing
2. Editing and proofing
3. Making an ePub
4. Distributing your book through Amazon, Apple, B&N etc
5. Online marketing, including Google Ads
6. Social media, using Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest etc
7. Traditional marketing, with a special focus on your local media