The FastPencil Marketplace brings authors, editors, illustrators, marketing professionals, and other experts together as part of a new approach to writing, publishing, and distributing books and eBooks.
Authors are between a rock and a hard place, as today’s TechCrunch piece by Paul Carr illustrates. He describes how Amazon customers expressed their displeasure at the lack of a Kindle version of Michael Lewis bestseller The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, by giving 1-star reviews of the book, even though they hadn’t read it. They were so upset that W.W. Norton, the publisher, had elected to “embargo” the Kindle version, milking sales of the hardcover version as long as possible.
For Carr, this sort of customer activism is problematic. He understands customer annoyance at W.W. Norton’s antiquated belief that denying customers what they want is actually good business strategy. But as a published author, he feels for authors whose books are impugned because of these business decisions:
I speak from pained experience as an author when I say that we have absolutely no say on when our books are released, in what format and at what price.
As an author you are beholden to a big publisher like W.W. Norton. You place your hard work in their care and hope that they’ll understand your audience. You hope that they will stop thinking of themselves as publishers of printed books, and start thinking of themselves as purveyors of your work, in whatever printed or digital form it might appear.
You’re also beholden to Amazon. You’re almost asking to get stepped on as the online goliath battles the titans of old world publishing. You are in the middle. They fight over pricing and distribution, while you hope that somehow, miraculously you will emerge from their duel unscathed.
If you’re an author, published or not, it’s time to realize that business as usual doesn’t favor you. It’s not about you. It’s about big publishers trying to stave off the future, and Amazon trying to control it. Meanwhile, they’re both pissing off your customers.
As this NY Times article illustrates, there’s a war on. It’s a war for the future of eBooks. The combatants are fighting over who controls pricing. Will the “agency model” used by Apple (publisher sets price and Apple receives a 30% commission) prevail, or will Amazon’s approach ($9.99 standard eBook price) win?
And while the big guys slug it out, where are authors? Who is watching out for their interests?
What about a model in which the author sets the price for eBooks? In fact, why not let the author set the price for any book they publish, regardless of format?
During CES back in January, a hard-charging young reporter named Jennifer Smart hit FastPencil’s Dave Claytor with some questions about our service. Check out the interview:
Estimating the demand and thus the print run for a book has been a guessing game since Gutenberg’s day. This means that the industry’s supply chain is exceedingly wasteful. About 30% of books in America are returned to the publisher.
Enter print on demand (POD), one of the technologies that is transforming the publishing world. Without POD, there would be no FastPencil.
We’re excited to see so many subject matter experts taking advantage of FastPencil’s streamlined writing and publishing system. Here are some notable recent titles from thought leaders in disparate domains:
Poker star Dusty Schmidt presents his first book — one that stands to shake up poker in the same way Moneyball did for baseball. A consummate “grinder,” Dusty Schmidt has played nearly 7 million hands of online poker over more than 10,000 hours during his five-year career. He’s won over $3 million during that period, and has never experienced a losing month. Schmidt offers an inspiring look at how in just five years, he went from not knowing a thing about poker to netting a seven-figure annual income.
Based on a true story, Some Way Home is the account of the healing of Dylan, a prototypical foster child. David Kenney has been a psychologist for over twenty years; the last fifteen in one of Michigan’s top ranking school districts. He is also a noted speaker and has presented on topics such as healing trauma, stress management, anxiety reduction, helping children with attention deficits, behavior as language, general parenting and achieving success in our schools.
Ron Edmonds is president of The Principium Group, a merger & acquisition advisory firm which targets the green industry. He is a frequent writer and speaker on topics related to green industry mergers & acquisition, and he edits Green Industry Mergers & Acquisition News. How to Sell Your Green Business is a practical guide for owners of green industry businesses such as lawn care companies, landscape contractors, nurseries, garden centers and similar businesses considering the sale of their business either now or sometime in the future as part of an exit strategy.
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