How many self-published books have you bought?

I receive tons of self-published books for free (and unsolicited) but have only bought two. One was by an AW author who'd been telling her publishing story on these threads; I was curious and had reason to assume the book would be in good shape (it was). The other was a YA novel I saw touted on a trusted book blog as the next Hunger Games. I liked it enough that I'll buy the sequel.

The lesson I draw from that is that a tough, articulate blogger with a following on Goodreads (someone who gives negative reviews, too, and is clear about his/her criteria) can really sell a book, whatever its provenance.

I buy almost exclusively e-books now, and I always download the sample first.

There's another problem--time. I don't buy books I'm unsure about not because I'm afraid of losing money, but because I'm not the fastest reader in the world, and I have limited amounts of time to read. I won't buy a book I think looks mediocre or potentially like something I won't enjoy because I don't want to waste my time not enjoying something.

It's not monetary. The same rule applies to going to the library. They're all free, but I'm not going to pick a book that I think might suck. I'll find the one that looks the most interesting and read that.

If the problem is that the book doesn't look very good, it doesn't matter to me if you make it free or not, and sadly the only thing that can make the books better is authors taking self-publishing more seriously and doing the work it takes to put out a quality product. You can't control that short of becoming a publisher--at which point you're no longer self-publishing.

I know I'm not representative of everyone, and a lot of people buy books for free or for cheap, but I can't imagine people paying for a subscription service to download books. And to be honest, I'm not sure I see a way that, as an author, this could be done fairly. Would they get a flat fee? A monthly cut? What if one author's books "sold" ten thousand, and another sold ten? Would they be receiving the same amount? I'm not sure I'm seeing a way this could be done that wouldn't potentially be ripping off the author.

lukedc said:

Thank you for your opinion, and I was just wondering, do you know if anyone might find such a website useful? Maybe authors who write short stories? I am not sure if anyone would use such a site. You seem to have a lot of experience, so I was just wondering what you think. Thanks.

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Dude

You blew off one of the people with the most experience on this site—Old Hack.

What do you envision your site doing? Offering ? Being?

Are you thinking about a site that sells the books via a download?

Do you have the skills to build a secure transaction site?

Have you looked at the sites out there already that sell ebooks?

Amazon
Smashwords
B & N
goodreads
fictionwise
Apple's iBook store
ereader.com
booksonboard

These are the large ones. There are lots more--like All Romance Books.

Not to mention all the ebook publishers who sell direct, or publishers like Baan who sell their own books directly.

Go look at the list of Display Sites in Bewares (scroll down).

What do you envision offering? What kind of a site and service ?

lukedc said:

Thank you for your opinion, and I was just wondering, do you know if anyone might find such a website useful? Maybe authors who write short stories? I am not sure if anyone would use such a site. You seem to have a lot of experience, so I was just wondering what you think. Thanks.

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I suggest you research the success of Amazon's service that does exactly what you're talking about. I think it's called Amazon Prime? maybe Kindle Prime? What ever it is, all enrolled books can be checked out for free.

ResearchGuy said:

You've never seen Dan Poynter's Self-publishing Manual? Or the Rosses' book on self-publishing?

Both are self-published.

Interesting omission for a denizen of self-publishing threads.

--Ken

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Denizen? Nay, I am aught but a simple wanderer, lost among the forums, who merely followed the title from the New Posts search.

So nay, I have not heard of either book or person.

I think that your idea for a book site has been done before; not to say if you add some twists you can't make it different.

I've never bought a self-published book, but had gotten some free ones from giveaways. I still haven't read them sadly. Too busy or my friends all recommend the same book and it moves up in my priority reading list.

Not one.

I've downloaded several free ones on my Kindle, but so far I've not been motivated to spend money on one.

Although some of the free ones ended up being so good I would have paid for them, I just didn't have to.

I think you have two main problems with your idea.

The first is that you're looking to specifically cater to an extraordinarily tight fisted customer base. How cheap does someone have to be when they won't even pay 0.99 for an ebook but would rather rent it instead? Anyone who thinks 0.99 is too expensive to pay for a BOOK is probably going to think 0.25 is too expensive too. People that cheap? They're not going to pay anything. They're going to steal the book through a pirate site. There is no incentive for these people to shop in your store.

Secondly, you are looking to source the content of your store from a labour base (authors) that can already earn more than you offer them by leaving their book in the 0.99 category on Smashazon, where they can offer the self-promotional 'free this week' and 'free to lend' already.

Your idea does not make economic sense.

lukedc said:

Thank you for your advice. I looked at that, but it is kind of different because Amazon does not have unlimited downloads.

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Sure it does. You really need to do some research. Not just posting questions but actually go look at the sites and services. Smashwords and Amazon make it very very easy; Barnes and Noble and iBooks slightly less easy, but Smashwords will propagate a book in multiple formats for an author--and then pay them for every purchase.

Amazon pays for all the bandwidth and the transaction services, and generates reports. Authors set the price for their books, and collect a royalty.

lukedc said:

What if I pay authors 25 cents per unique download, PLUS profit sharing, where extra income is divided among authors based on downloads?

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But on Amazon authors get a royalty (70% or 35%) of whatever price they set. And they can get paid for borrowed books.

You might start by reading merrihyatts thread on Tossing my recent self-publishing and e-publishing experience out there.

lukedc said:

Thank you for your advice. I looked at that, but it is kind of different because Amazon does not have unlimited downloads.

What if I pay authors 25 cents per unique download, PLUS profit sharing, where extra income is divided among authors based on downloads?

do you think that writers would more likely use that? Thank you so much.

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The authors you more than likely get will be those who's books are not selling anyway. If they are not selling, there is a reason and it is not because they are promoting on the wrong sites. If they sell on smashwords or Amazon, you can't get much bigger.

As a reader, I see no reason to subscribe to a site that charges me a monthly fee when I can download unlimited reads on my kindle with my Amazon Prime subscription. I see no reason to subscribe to numerous sites that have limited selections. Meaning, none of the big 6 authors.

As an author, I am not going to put my work up anywhere that does not pay me a decent royalty per download, and that includes Amazon's lending library.

And paying 25 cents per download is a laugh. Including profit sharing is also a laugh because there is no guarantee the author will get anything from a business that is defunct in a year or two at the most.

lukedc said:

Thank you for your advice. I looked at that, but it is kind of different because Amazon does not have unlimited downloads.

What if I pay authors 25 cents per unique download, PLUS profit sharing, where extra income is divided among authors based on downloads?

do you think that writers would more likely use that? Thank you so much.

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I'm not a business person, but here's where I see a potential major problem here: you aren't getting paid per download, but by subscription. So let's say that you require five dollars a month for unlimited downloads (I can't imagine people paying much more, btw--look at Netflix).

All a person has to do is download 20 books per month and 100% of the profits has gone to the author (and again, 25 cents isn't exactly a great deal for the author). Now take into account that, when things are free, it's not uncommon for people to just download a crapload of stuff. I've met people with hundreds of books on their kindles. It'll take forever and a day to actually read all of them, and most never do.

For every person you have like me who won't buy a crappy book for cheap because I actually intend to read the books I buy, there are others who do the opposite. They fill their devices with books they don't plan to read, that are easily discarded after a page or two.

In other words, if any number of your subscribers chose to just periodically download thirty or forty or more books in a month, you wouldn't have the money to pay even $.25 to the author, much less the fees it would require to run the site itself.

I just don't see how this is a logical business model, to be honest with you.

Also there is the fact that I already have Amazon and Smashwords (and Lulu, and ARe and Nook), who I know and trust and who have a huge selection of books. Why would I need to go somewhere else to get a smaller selection and most likely at a higher price?

I've bought three erotic romances. I've read the first one (probably novella-sized) and skimmed the other two (short stories) so far.

Regarding the first one, it was okay, but there were some typos (the most notable being leaving off the closing quotes) near the end, and the final scene took place decades in the future, revealing that one of the women had died of cancer. That really ruined it for me. Who puts death in erotica? It's like that one hentai that I saw (I think it's called "Milk Money") where the mom ends up murdering the young couple (one of which is her daughter). That made re-watching the sex scenes unpleasant.

Every books I've bought or read in the last year, other than Nocturnal and ASOIAF.

I've bought dozens - and because of the price, been able to buy so many more than paperbacks, gotten more for free, and sampled...a couple of hundred? I tend to fill up on samples on the weekend, read through them, then buy the ones I like.

The smallest percentage are books by people I know, the rest are either recommendations, things I've seen promoted, or just found by randomly browsing Amazon.

frimble3 said:

Never bought an e-book, as I have no reader or plans to get one.
No free books, although I've bought books at a nominal cost from the library sale tables if they look interesting. I get 'free' from the library, a major source of 'books I want to buy'.
I buy 50 - 100 books a years. Chiefly bricks-and-mortar.
I've bought 4 self-published books, ever, that I know of. Two were fiction, I know the authors, knew what they were about, thought I would like them, and I did. Two were non-fiction (my real reading preference). One was well-designed and produced, and thoroughly described and explained a new technique for a craft that I was interested in (with excellent, step-by-step colour illustrations). The other was a piece of junk, that took a simple concept, added no new information, was sloppily put together, and had badly hand-drawn (scrawled, really) pattern pieces that would have to be re-drawn to be useable. If I could have seen a sample, I wouldn't have touched it.

That to my mind, is what a self-published 'review' site needs: mandatory 'Look Inside' feature, and not Amazon's first few pages, that a publisher can game by using the copyright page, and title page as half of their quota.
I don't know if Amazon charges for 'Look Inside', but it should be mandatory with a listing:
A good big chunk of actual text, the table of contents, a sample of any illustrations, and the index/bibliography (if any). A reasonable sample and I don't need to read other people's opinions.
(I read reviews for 'spoilers', actual information on the plot. I assume that the rest is subjective nonsense.)

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The Look Inside feature shows 10% of the book. When I put my books up, I am sparse with the front matter. I have a title page, a short thank you (like, a sentence) and a short dedication to my family. All the longer acknowledgments, contact me, author bio, etc, are all at the back of the book. Consequently, my Look Inside on my first book goes into chapter three. (It's a 90,000 word novel, so you get 9,000 words). I haven't checked to see how far my other two books go as it hadn't occurred to me.

MMcDonald64 said:

The Look Inside feature shows 10% of the book. When I put my books up, I am sparse with the front matter. I have a title page, a short thank you (like, a sentence) and a short dedication to my family. All the longer acknowledgments, contact me, author bio, etc, are all at the back of the book. Consequently, my Look Inside on my first book goes into chapter three. (It's a 90,000 word novel, so you get 9,000 words). I haven't checked to see how far my other two books go as it hadn't occurred to me.

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Just wanted to comment that that's an excellent strategy. Can't say how many times I've looked at a sample that had "extra" material than the story itself.

Katrina S. Forest said:

Just wanted to comment that that's an excellent strategy. Can't say how many times I've looked at a sample that had "extra" material than the story itself.

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Yep, it bugs me as a reader. I don't want to page through ten pages of stuff and then only get three pages of story. In fact, I can't think of a time when I finished a long sample and didn't buy the book. Three or four pages isn't enough unless the writer has completely captured me. If I'm annoyed at pages and pages of foreword, dedications and author info, I'm not in the best frame of mind to like a book anyway.

lukedc said:

What if I pay authors 25 cents per unique download, PLUS profit sharing, where extra income is divided among authors based on downloads?

do you think that writers would more likely use that? Thank you so much.

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Others have answered the Kindle Prime question far better up thread, but here are some things to consider:

(a) As a new site with no user base, you do not have much to offer authors, because the potential for income isn't there. (e.g. if you have 10 subscribers, the author maxes out at 10 'borrows' on your site.)

(b) As a new site with limited/no authors you have nothing to offer subscribers. Netflix (mentioned above) is having trouble maintaining $8/mo subscribers because they don't carry some of the many video streams out there and often can't license new release movies. Your site would have to pay at least library license fees for trade published books (substantially higher than an individual buying them) and then would have to market to attract independent authors (who by-all-rights should demand a library license fee as well).

You will have need capital to run this business for an extended amount of time without the benifit of significant subscriber income. I can tell you that the first time you're payments to authors are late or underpaid, that will go viral on all the boards where your potential publishers socialize and books will be pulled out of your program.

So, even if you can put together a technical platform that is professional, provides useful reporting, provides DRM and grows a community (and that is HARD to do), you'll have to make potential author publishers believe you have the capital to carry this to the point where it is self sustaining. AS SUCH, the term "profit sharing" is almost a useless offer for the near future.

Under your $0.25/download program, an author would have to get 8 borrows to equal the income from one sale on Amazon at $2.99. How will you convince authors that your site will result in nearly 8 times the conversion rate that Amazon provides? Authors would see a better ROI going free on KDP and netting reviews on their books, than making them available through your program.

In general, paid subscription sites are hard to establish. You have to offer some sort of value that distinguishes you from competitors (especially when those competitors are free sites). If you want to look at a semi-similar concept, look at how well paid loyalty cards are doing for B&N and those types. My understanding is that they are not burning down the house as a direct revenue stream, their income is from backend rentals of marketing lists.

If you really want to do this, then I suggest you start now in building your community, since that is what will attract author/publishers. If you had a community of 50k - 75k users, then that would be a very different proposition. But, even in a community of 75k registered users, you would be lucky to convert 3% to paid subscribers (so 2250 subscribers on a very high side - 750 is more realistic), but that would give you a place to start promoting to author/publishers.

I can only think of one equivalent 'book club' set up recently by a major romance publisher, and I'd give that sevrice 12 months, tops. I don't think it adds up economically.

I don't think the business plan is necessarily all thought out, but the idea isn't dumb. I think Joe Sixpack would have a hard time starting something like that that would be successful, but I've seen stranger things happen.

As far as Amazon Prime goes, everything on their site that I've seen says members can download as many as 1 book per month. I'd hardly call that unlimited.

Jay

Ps - Just about all the books I buy now are self-published. There are enough good one out there that I don't have to pay "normal" prices to get a good story.