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| Joachim De Posada |
By Joachim De Posada
Website • Follow Me on Twitter • Follow on Facebook
The
incredible changes in the book publishing industry.
After an
absence of a few months, this, my first article is about an industry that I
love, the publishing industry.
I have just
returned from the American Booksellers Association, over 1200 booths, 600
authors, thousands of attendees and lots of changes in the industry.
First of
all, it is no surprise that Amazon has had a huge influence in the publishing
business. Who could have thought that a young guy named Jeff Bezos, working as
a financial analyst in Wall Street, after coming up with one simple idea,
having every book printed available to anyone, was able to carry it out?
Amazon
right now has 75% of the market for books and electronic books.
For this
reason, giant book sellers such as Borders are no longer in existence and
Barnes and Noble is trying to survive. What a loss for PR when Borders closed
the Mayaguez, Carolina and the Plaza Las Americas bookstores where so many of
us hanged out almost every day.
So who is
picking up the slack left by giant bookstores going out of business?
The
independents, known in the industry as the “indies”, they are the ones that are
doing very well even under a difficult economic climate.
The indies
are do what no search engine can do and that is help people find books that
they don’t know they want to read. When you go into an independent bookstore,
sometimes you are looking for a specific book but more often, you are browsing,
not searching. You are hoping to find a book you didn’t know existed.
Independent
book owners are able to be very creative in attracting people to the store.
They work with local authors and organize book signings and conferences that
are very well attended. Some of them sell food and drinks and on Friday nights
and Saturdays make a killing.
I have
asked lots of people, “do you prefer to read a physical book or would you
rather read it on your kindle or notebook”?
Reading a physical book still wins but I admit that the number of
electronic readers is growing. It is a generational “thing”, the younger the
person the more attuned to electronics that person is. In fact, electronic
books in Amazon for the first time outsold physical books.
This
tremendous growth in electronic books is the main reason that now anyone can
write a book. In Never in history has
there been a better opportunity to write that book that you have inside
you. And, I assure you that everyone has
a good book inside. In fact, I recently read that 82% of people have at one
time or another thought about writing a book
Has the
thought occurred to you?
Well, the
thought occurred to Dominique Bauby who
wrote his book after having suffered a stroke, one that left him totally
paralyzed except for his left eyelid which he open and close. Yes, he had help
from a young lady but he is the one that had the book in his head and
transmitted the letters to the young lady by signaling with his eyelid. The
book is called “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”.
My dear
friend Frances Rios who self- published “The Glue Factor: Making presentations
that make your message stick” and who is a rising star in the speaking world.
Arleen
Muniz, a young teenager working as a cashier in a supermarket in Ponce, wanted
to write a poetry book and she sure did when she wrote “Un lápiz a mi corazón”. She sells it everywhere she can
and to people that go through her cash register every day. She is working on
her second book.
My dear
friend Anita Paniagua who I met when she was working for WOSO in San Juan as an
account executive and teaching at a local university and she said she wanted to
write a book. I encouraged her and gave her some advice and she wrote a book on
entrepreneurship titled “Emprendeser”. She is doing seminars and selling books
and she is very happy.
How about
Tyler Duswalt who wrote a book titled “The short book on how to become a
blogging expert”. He is only 10 years
old so imagine my surprise when I saw him signing books next to me in an even
in Los Angeles.
Look, you
now can get published in a variety of ways. You can go through a traditional
publisher, very hard to do but possible. You need a literary agent to be able
to even be considered by a good publisher. The advantage of going this route is
the prestige it carries, and the distribution of your book by making it
available in bookstores. Self-published books rarely make it to
bookstores.
You can
self- publish your own book. The
advantage is that you control everything and you make up to 80% profit on your
book. If you are a good marketer and you get around, you can make lots of money
going the self-published way. In 2010 there were 133,036 self-published titles
and this past year it went up to 211,269 (based on ISBN’s) The most popular
genre in terms of units is fiction (45%) but non- fiction leads in sales (38%).
The average price for a self-published fiction book is $6.94 while nonfiction
titles sell for around $19.32. And while e books accounted for 41% of
self-published units, they only accounted for 11% of sales; the reason? The
average self-published e-book sold for
$3.18 while trade paperbacks had an
average price of $12.68 and hardcovers $14.40(as per Publishers Weekly)
A third
option now is to go the electronic route. You simply write your book in the
form of an e book and you upload it to Amazon. It is a rather simple process.
There are people that will do it for you for very little money or you can learn
rather easily and do it yourself. Just Google “how to write a kindle book?” and
you will get lots of ideas. Some people have made hundreds of thousands of
dollars selling their electronic books.
So, even
though the industry is going through great changes, at the BEA convention I saw
great enthusiasm and lots of authors very happy to be signing their books. It
is just such a refreshing environment. Write your book and maybe I will see you
at next year’s convention.
