A rather belated Happy New Year! May 2013 bring you peace and happiness.
2012 was a difficult year in many respects. The weather, of course, made normal life all but impossible for thousands of people whose homes were flooded. The terrible weather didn’t just affect the UK, of course, with communities across Europe and Asia also being hit. As I write this news is coming in of floods claiming lives in Brazil. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, South Australia is suffering stifling heat and forest fires are sweeping Tasmania.
No one seems to know if these extremes are down to global warming, whether or not that warming is in any way the result of human activity, but it is alarming to hear that we have to expect more of the same.
In a much less significant way, the weather also affected our book-selling activities.
The number of bookshops has continued to decline as more and more have gone out of business, finding it impossible to cope with rising costs in the face of competition from online sellers, charity shops and ebooks. We spotted it coming years ago and we’ve only published print copies of books that we believed to be of local interest that could be sold through outlets other than bookshops, particularly tourist attractions, but the dire weather meant few tourists. We have now lost some of those outlets and experienced poor sales from most of the others.
The result was that we were very cautious and only published two new print books through the year.
We have experimented with ebooks, but although they are easy and inexpensive to publish, developing an effective marketing campaign has proved impossible. The main problem is the sheer quantity pouring onto the market, most of them self-published by hopeful authors persuaded to write and publish by the wildly optimistic dream of achieving commercial success and fame.
With tens of thousands of self-published authors swamping the social media sites and all book forums with self-promoting posts, it is practically impossible to keep a book in public notice long enough to have any impact on sales.
One technique adopted by many self-publishers has been to make their ebook free for a period in the hope that the number of downloads might propel the book into the ‘free download’ charts and give the book some visibility, if only for a while. There are two drawbacks with this approach. Firstly, there are now so many free books on offer that many readers have become accustomed to never paying for books; secondly, if an author gets into the habit of making their books free, readers know that if they want to read a particular book all they have to do is wait until they can get it for nothing.
Good reviews are seen as the author’s best weapon, but this has led to problems in 2012 – problems that have involved more than just the self-publishers. ‘Sock-puppetry’ put in an appearance. This is the practice of authors posting reviews using fake identities, the reviews raving about their own books (of course) and ridiculing books by competitors. We also discovered paid-for reviews and learned that top-selling author, John Locke, had paid for hundreds of five-star reviews.
The paid-for review situation wasn’t confined to ebooks. I read of ‘reviewers’ who have posted many thousands of reviews on Amazon, at the rate of dozens per day, and who made a useful secondary income by selling the review copies. It all makes the antics of most self-promoters, when they get family and friends to post a load of five-star reviews immediately upon publication, seem like very small beer indeed.
Speaking of beer brings me to one bit of good news with which to end this blog post.
A Cornish village pub, after being closed for a while, has reopened as a joint pub-cum-bookshop. Now there’s a great idea. Let’s hope it catches on. Our book delivery runs will have to be made by taxi – unless I can persuade Cheryl to do all the driving.
Have a good 2013.