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TBOWT 032 – News and Muse
The Business of Writing Today Podcast: Where savvy writers go to make their books, their business.
News and Muse
Peggy and Larry discuss hot topics in the industry over the last few weeks or months.
Topics for today are:
- Amazon buys Goodreads- Now that Amazon has purchased Goodreads.com
- Barnes & Noble 3rd Quarter Sales are Down – Especially in the Nook division. What impact has Amazon’s KDP Select had on the Nook? Peggy and Larry talk about the effects of Amazon’s KDP Select and its 90 day exclusivity clause and its impact on other e-book aggregators.
- AuthorHouse is being investigated and a possible class action suit. over alleged deceptive practices.
- ISBN or AISN- Should authors still use ISBNs (Industry Standard Book Numbers to identify their books? ISBNs are issued in the United States by http://bowker.com. AISNs (Amazon Industry Standard Number) are issued by Amazon. Which one should I have? Peggy talks about the need to continue with the ISBN as the industry standard. She believes that the ISBN is still critical for non-Amazon sales. For those authors who want to carry their books in Target, Costco, or Kroger’s the ISBN is still the accepted norm to identify books in most retail outlets. When books are sold in retail outlets, bookstores and non-bookstores, alike, they are identified by the ISBN and the sale of that book is in turn reported to BookScan. Authors on Amazon may go to Amazon Author Central to get a snapshot of book sales. That snapshot of books is based on the reporting sent to BookScan. The bottom line: Use an ISBN number for both print books and e-books.
- Amazon Changes Its Algorithm for Free E-books – Previously Amazon counted a free e-book “sale” as a paid sale. That meant that if customers downloaded 10,000 free e-books during your KDP Select free book promotion days (see our previous podcast on KDP Select), your book would shoot up to the top of the ranks. This is no longer true. Amazon is gravitating away from the free is the same as paid model, and now gives you credit one tenth of one book sale for each free book “sold.” That means that you now have to “sell” ten free e-books to count as one paid sale, for ranking purposes. This puts the emphasis back where it belongs, I think, on sales instead of free downloads.
But for those of you who relied on free e-books to drive your ranking, the model has changed drastically. Peggy discusses some of the ways you can revamp your model.
- Genre and books sales statistics from Amazon: Here are the highlights of what types of books sold on Amazon last year. 908,266 non-fiction tiles on Amazon as compared to only 576,276 fiction titles. Some of the bestselling genres may surprise you. Religion and Spirituality and self-help, and how-to books have 10% and 8.8% respectively. Three other top selling genres are Business and Investing, Professional and Technical, and History. In non-fiction Contemporary Fiction and Erotica lead the way with 9.4% and 6.4%.
Tip of the Week: Download free e-books and search by average ranking or category at http://freebooksifter.com
Source: http:publishyourownebooks.com
Great websites for publishing industry news:
Sites Geared to authors:
Joe Konrath’s Newbies Guide to Publishing
Joel Friedlander’s The Book Designer blog
http://www.thebookdesigner.com
http://tbowt.com and on http://businessofwritingsummit.com
We love to hear your comments, so please leave us your voicemail: 855-675-6225 or e-mail us at:
peggy@tbowt.com or larry@tbowt.com
The website is www.tbowt.com
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Business of Writing Summit can be found at www.businessofwritingsummit.com
