Rejection, rejection, rejection...

Just had a thought while reading this thread. I know self-publishing is popular (deservedly so) with people who cannot be bothered doing the agent/publisher dance. The big problem with self publishing is promotion.

Maybe this has already been done. But what if there was a website set up specifically to inform the public about new self-pubbed books? A website that would charge the author a SMALL fee to be listed, but would categorise the book, publish a picture of it and the blurb that goes on the back cover, and include details of where the book can be bought?

This site would be updated frequently (daily, if that would reflect the frequency of new books), and books would top the list on the first day of listing, and be moved down as other new ones take their place. All an author would need to do is contact the website, pay the fee (I'm talking small fee ...£20-£30-ish ...per book) and the photo and blurb would go up on the website, ensconced in the right category ...which could be as specific as possible.

Readers could visit this site at any time to see notifications of all new self-pubbed books that have just been released. It would be up to them to go to Amazon, or wherever, to buy the books. If the books were listed by most recent publication, the readers would know to check the lists frequently, so as not to miss hearing about a book they might be interested in reading.

This might be a nice little moneyspinner for whoever wanted to run the site. And it might catch on.

I don't know how workable this would be, or what it would take for readers to get to know about the site, but if it got up and running, it would do both readers and writers a big favour, without competing against any booksellers.

 

I think there are a few sites like this (Bookbub, maybe? The name feels familiar) but I can see a few issues with it in practice:

a) Anyone starting one needs to be able to build an audience of their own, otherwise it's not much use to authors. There's a chicken/egg problem here in that it's hard to get people adding their books (especially for a fee) if they don't have an audience, and it's hard to build an audience if they've got no authors to show them. There's plenty of ways to solve this, but it's a non-trivial problem.

b) It's reasonable to expect people to only stay interested in the books being advertised if they've enjoyed the ones advertised in the past. If there's no quality control here - it's just a case of you pay £X, you definitely will be promoted - you run the risk of promoting rubbish, and your readers losing interest.

c) You can get around problem b by adding some quality control. This means someone needs to invest some time or money in checking the submitted books, which is a significant overhead, and it also means they're effectively acting as another gatekeeper. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but does take away one of the big benefits of self-publishing for a lot of people.

That's not to say it's a bad idea, or that it wouldn't work. But I think it'd be a pretty tricky thing to make a success of.

 

Collaboration, Homer?

1. You write Sodartha's POV
2. I write Brittany's
3. ???
4. PROFIT

When we're trillionaires we'll call up our publishers and be all, "Hey, you need to publish 12 anthologies featuring our friend deadrats' short stories. Give them all you promo you got."

And then we'll all ride into the sunset.

 

There's also the element of most readers not being likely to seek out self-published books, in which case why wouldn't they just go to Goodreads or Amazon or wherever and look at all published books, rather than limiting themselves to a subset of published books?

 

Categories? Dunno. Anyway, it was just a thought.

 

I actually don't think this would be so much of a problem.

If you're running a service like this, you're not going to be looking to attract all readers, you're going to be looking to specifically attract readers who are enthusiastic about self-publishing. I agree that'll be a pretty small proportion of the whole, but it doesn't need to be big. There's a billion readers in the world, and you'd only need 10, maybe 20 thousand of them on your mailing list for something like this to be viable. Maybe less, depending on exactly what your costs were and exactly how you were making money from it. You've also got the advantage that your list would be self-selecting - you can advertise generally, but it's the people who love and are excited by the idea of self-publishing who are going to be the ones who sign up.

Essentially it's just another form of niching. In the same way, most readers probably don't seek out m/m romance books - but you've proven there's still a healthy market there.

Of course, you're left with the chicken/egg problem of finding those 20,000 people in the first place.

 

Sounds like Amazon sans the perks for either side. Authors, you still get drowned out by the competition and pay for the honour. Readers, you get no quality control and lose access to a vast chunk of the market in tradpubbed books.

 

I think that what's needed is a serious review site for self-published books, with the system very carefully written to be un-gameable. I don't know if "un-gameable" is possible, and I suspect that the code would require a few million (tens of millions? more?) dollars' worth of programmer hours to write, so I don't see it happening in the near future.

 

My idea was simply to make readers aware of new books that have recently self-published and where they can buy them.

At the moment, the only way a reader learns about a new book is either by accident, or by seeing a promotion for it. Traditional publishers can promote their books all sorts of ways, but self-pubbed authors (especially authors who aren't skilled at marketing their books, and prefer to write them instead) will struggle to even be visible at all.

My idea would simply provide a way for readers to check what's new out there, based on overall category, if they are so inclined. It would be up to each reader to go to Amazon (or whatever company the book is sold by), use the 'look inside' feature to gauge the quality of the writing, read reviews on Amazon, etc, to make up their minds about the quality of a book. Review and quality would not be the purpose of my proposed site.

I would certainly use it as a reader. I would look for new titles that interest me in categories (like historical fiction), and if the title grabs me, I'd read the blurb. If I was still interested, then I'd go to Amazon or wherever, and learn more.

At the moment, unless a self-pubbed author makes a huge self-promoting splash, readers don't even know their book is out there. This has nothing to do with its quality. Merely its visibility and the promotional skill of its author.

My idea was to provide an extra link between a self-pubbed author and the seller. Not to provide a filter service or a review service. That would take too much money and time and resources, and would limit the site to authors who managed to jump through yet another hoop. It would also be less immediate, as it takes time to sort and review each book.

I'd say list the book, no matter what, let the reader know it's there, then let it stand for itself when a reader scrutinizes it.

 

Amazon lists books. I don't see this site doing anything for the visibility problem, seeing as there's still going to be hundreds of books on the listing and it's that quantity that makes it so hard to be noticed.

 

But do they run an exclusive list of 'new' self-pubbed books (not mixed in with traditionally published books), sorted according to category? That's what I'm shooting for.

I'm not asking if Amazon SELLS new self-pubbed books. Of course they do. But for you to notice a self pubbed book a the moment, it will need to be promoted—or you'll need to get very lucky with your subject search. (And some folk don't sell on Amazon.)

A traditional publisher publishes their list of 'new titles' all the time. Where is the equivalent all-inclusive list of new books by self-pubbers? I've not seen one.

 

If you consider how widely used it would need to be to be worth its salt, the reader is still going to have to get lucky with search terms. A mere list is nice to have, but with even a hundred entries the chances of finding what you're looking for go down dramatically.
As a reader, having a nigh endless list to scroll through might appeal, but as an author, paying to be on said list very much doesn't, not when I can get comparable exposure on Amazon for free. The reader might have to specify which genre they want to read before I've a snowball's chance of being seen, but I'd take ten errant pairs of peepers who want urban fantasy, say, than a hundred pairs looking for everything else.

I don't think it's a bad idea, just a bit redundant. I can imagine ever using it on either side, but I also fail to fathom self publishing, so maybe I'm the oddball.

 

What benefit would the reader gain from excluding traditionally published books from their search?

Amazon has this function but without the exclusion: go to the books section, filter by genre, and then order by release date. I've often wished you could then filter out self-published books, but I can't think why someone would want to do the opposite.

 

Okay, I'll try one more time, and then give up.

Traditionally published books are already promoted and brought to the notice of the reading public (via reviews in magazines, publisher's lists, exposure in bookstores, author appearances at book festivals, etc.) Self-pubbed ones are not. It's one of the things that fans of traditional publishing (on this forum) are always banging on about, regarding the benefits of traditional publishing. You have a better chance of reaching your readership as a traditionally published author because the publishing house handles the promotion of your book.

The self-pubbed author has to get very creative (and busy) finding ways to advertise that they have a product at all, never mind touting its 'worth.'

The assumption that all self-pubbed books are bad is simply not true. Of course a large proportion of them are badly written and not worth the candle. But that's up to the reader to decide. There are good self-pubbed books out there. (I own a couple, printed on demand—but these were written by people I know, which is where I heard about them.)

A list would simply give self-pubbed books a little extra boost to get noticed. I fail to see the harm.

If such a website existed I would use it. Not only as a reader, because I'm interested in self-published books, but also as a self-pubbed author. It's a new industry, and we need to look at new ways of doing things. This would boost sales, not undermine them. It's win-win for authors AND sellers.

 

But they are on the platform that (I believe) most books are bought from, and certainly most self-published books: Amazon. I browse books using the method I described, which doesn't favour traditionally published over self.

That method has significant advantages over this - it includes millions of books rather than hundreds, and with one click I can see all the information I need, plus reviews, plus purchase it with one further click.

I think both of us are outliers (you being particularly interested in self-published books and me not considering them at all), and the average reader doesn't distinguish--they're all just books. For them, there's no win here over browsing Amazon in the way most people probably do.

 

I don't think it changes anything, but I edited portions of my post while you were posting your reply. Yeeks. So you don't think I altered what I said after reading your response. This happens to me all the time. When will I learn NOT to pus the 'post reply' button until I know I've said exactly what I mean to say. Eh?

 

In my experience, never

 

I was going to say, using Amazon it`s relatively simple. I do know that Bookbaby sends me a list of free or cheap e-books but that`s inclusive of all not just self-published I think. You do get a lot of Twitter based sites that cater for self-publishing.

 

Yep I think there are many free services but I don't think any distinguish between publishing routes.

This has prompted me to try to look into how average readers find books. It's silly of me to assume everyone does it like me.

(P.S. Sorry deadrats that your thread has gone so off-topic. AFAIK you have no interest in self-publishing so none of this is relevant to you.)

 

Well, I would say that due to the popularity of sites like Amazon that most people do search in the same fashion. Take shops for instance, I can tell you that I think I only visited one actual book shop last year, only one, in the whole of last year.

 

I honestly don't see that there's a significant market of readers who are specifically looking for self-published books.

 

There's a bit of a self-publishers-marketing-to-other-self-publishers phenomenon, I think - they buy each others' books as a gesture of support (or as a trade) more than out of reading interest. You can see these sorts of exchanges on the Kindle boards and other places self-publishers congregate. But I'm really not sure what the market size would be, or whether there's a genuine interest in searching out books by category if they're really only buying as a quid pro quo gesture...