The Crystal Ball

I was scrolling through the NY Times bestseller list today and noticing the same thing I notice every Monday: it’s the same authors week after week. There are exceptions of course, but by and large the same names crop up again and again. This week it’s Khaled Hosseini, Michael Connolly and James Patterson (along with whatever ghostwriter he has on board for this venture), all fine writers, no doubt. But come on… are there really no other authors our there? Must we really be subjected to another repackaging of Nora Roberts’ works? Jeez…

Along with the bestseller list, I read an article about BookExpo America, a convention for the book publishing industry, wherein people in the publishing industry had the nerve to whine that writers are taking matters into their own hands. “…the industry continued to grapple with its evolving techno-future with a mixture of enthusiasm, anxiety and a whiff of desperation.�

The article touches on subjects such as in-store print-on-demand technology, and Long Tail theory wherein profit is generated not by selling huge numbers of a single item (read: yet another Grisham novel) but by selling a few units of a lot of items (think Amazon). A bookstore owner from Fairway, Kansas complained loudly about authors who link to Amazon from their own sites or who sell autographed copies of their own books directly to the public at the expense of traditional local booksellers. (Note to self: Autograph some copies of Requiem.) This apparently cuts into the store’s profits. She clearly believes that brick and mortar bookstores should be the only viable source for books. Wow. Where the hell has she been? I’m sure the owners of Tower Records felt this way about CDs, too. I have to wonder if she owns stock in a buggy whip manufacturer.

If any of you have written a book and tried to get it published recently then you know first hand that the odds of it getting past the agents and into an editor’s hands are something like one in a thousand, regardless of how well-written the book is – slim odds indeed. And provided it gets there, a new author has virtually no marketing budget, leaving few real avenues. Hence the DIY approach. An author will do whatever it takes to get his or her book into the hands of the reading public in the hopes that a later book will get some official support.

If this bookseller’s advice is to be heeded, I should just shut up and be happy that I won the publishing lottery, right? Well she can go fuck herself. If I have a work I believe in and get no help from an industry that’s scared shitless of technology and I am able to generate sales without their support, they damn well should be scared. Brick and mortar bookstores must be looking into their crystal balls and quivering with fear.

I absolutely love to go into a bookstore to browse the stacks and see what’s available, but far more often I log on to Amazon or BN.com or, in the interest of getting the author as much of the sales price as possible, to the author’s site or to the publisher. As a consumer, I’m agnostic with regard to the source of my book. As much as I want my local bookseller to remain open, time is my most precious commodity and in the end convenience takes the form of a mouse click rather than geographic proximity. Translation: I vote with my dollars and my mouse and the easiest way to get what I want is usually online.

As a worker bee in modern society, it’s incumbent on me to have an understanding of how my business works. As a writer in that same society, I have to understand that what I’m selling is not books per se, but the brand of self; I’m selling Chris Moreau. I have to watch out for my brand and for my products. I have to know what my readers want and give it to them. If I don’t produce a quality product, they won’t buy it.

Perhaps the publishing industry, from the publishers themselves right down to the bookstores, should put some small modicum of effort into researching the customer experience the way the online sellers have, rather than wringing their hands and worrying about how to support a supply chain that hasn’t changed in a century. There’s huge profit to be taken for whoever figures it out first.

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