Ads in eBooks

Ads in Ebooks

By Scott Nicholson

(Originally posted at Murderati)

I’ve gotten out of the “writer babble” business for two reasons: (1) I don’t know as much as I thought I did, and (2) it’s all changing so fast that even the boldest predictions of digital evolution quickly become laughable.

I don’t even use traditional publishing as a reference point anymore, because that is so far removed from most writers’ realities that it may as well be Shangri-la or Hollywood. The indie vs. trad debate is now only meaningful for a small group of people, and they are all making way more money than you or me.

So you are in it, and if you are lucky, you made a nice little nest egg back when everyone was standing on the sidelines deciding whether indie was the way to go. Hopefully, you shook off the intellectual shackles that chained us to the agent speed-dating sessions at writing conferences and were hammered and locked into place by “publishing experts” with 20-year writing careers in the old system. You know the mantras: “Get an agent,” “Only hacks self-publish,” and “You can’t produce and distribute a book without the advice of publishing experts.” Basically, ego affirmation. Of course the experts didn’t want to lose their position of authority (and in the agents’ case, the intermediary status of being the first in line to get checks.)

But the gate was left open and the horses all got out of the barn, or something like that (come up with your own gatekeeper metaphor; I am writing this for free!) So now we have a market where the 99-cent ebook had a year’s run, and the pool was finally beginning to find stratification (crappy books sinking, good books nailing stable plateaus) when Amazon unleashed the latest version of indie roulette—the free ebook.

I'm on record as predicting the flat-text e-book era has an outside range of five years, at least for fiction—specialized non-fiction and manuals will continue to be valuable for their content alone. I believe e-book sales will continue, but certainly not with expanding profits for all involved. Now that there are thousands of free Kindle books available every single day, how long before readers come to expect and even demand free books exclusively?

Freebie roulette. Great for readers. Good for Amazon (maybe in the short term, but it is hard to figure the long term). Terrible for authors.

The market is diverse enough to support many different price tiers, but writers who want to survive in 2015 will need to make money off of free books, or they will soon quit writing.

I only see one outcome: ad-supported or sponsored books. At first blush, you'd think N.Y. has an advantage, since Madison Avenue is right there. But can corporations, with their large structures, be able to compete when indie or smaller entities can react more quickly to present conditions instead of protecting some imagined status quo?

J.K. Rowling can inspire a Pottermore built around her brand, and James Patterson, Tom Clancy, and Clive Cussler have already built factories around their names (and, yes, V.C. Andrews, you can roll over in your grave two or three more times for all I care, because this is all your fault). But most of us are not factories or we wouldn’t have to indie publish.

This points out the new era of the branded writer. And not just "writer," but "content creator" and even mere "idea marketer." A personality is more suited to building brand identification and audience than a publisher is. I say "James Patterson" and you get an image. I say "Random House" and what do you get? Randomness. We've seen it here locally: "Ray's Weather" is where you check the weather and "Todd's Calendar" is where you click to find what's happening in the region—and both are ad supported. You can get the free content elsewhere but you don't get the human personality attached.

I'm already experimenting with the ad model because I believe it is viable. I am counting on Idea Marketing being one of my foundational pillars. I am not quite sure what it all looks like right now, but I look at it this way—you don't need NY in order to give away tons of free e-books or to spread an idea or to build a social platform. You are the idea you want to spread.

Other authors will say “I’ll never sell out.” (Ironically, those are usually the authors who have given most of their incomes to agents and publishers…) I don't blame people for sticking with what worked in the past. It all goes to how invested you are in a certain system and how the alternative looks, and, of course, the turf where you’ve staked out your ego. Publishing-industry talk on e-books uses phrases like "managing risk" and "cautious adaptation." That is why those of us in the trenches knew Barnes & Noble was in serious trouble when most in the “publishing industry” only realized it recently when BN’s horrifyingly bad third-quarter reports came in. They are working off of old data while I work off the data I got an hour ago.

And my data says this may be the very peak of the Golden Age of digital publishing. The $9.99 novel may be dead this year, since three-quarters of the current bestsellers are low-priced indie books. As fast as major publishers yank their name-brand authors out of digital libraries, 10 new indies cram into that virtual shelf space. Maybe forever. James Patterson’s factory can’t run on $2.99 ebooks, but mine can.

But what happens when the $2.99 and 99 cents drop to permanently free? Where’s your sponsor? Are you willing to go there? It's not going to be as clumsy as an image of a refreshing Bud Lite popping up when the main character enters a bar (though it's not unthinkable at some point.) Can you see Jack Reacher with a favorite brand of soft drink, or Bella Swan wearing only Calvin Klein? At what point is your willing suspension of disbelief shattered? At what point do you realize the ad is the only reason the book can exist at all?

My informal polling on ad-supported ebooks yields statements like: "I'll quit reading before I put up with that." I also remember saying I'd never carry a cell phone, or be on Facebook, or give up my vinyl albums, or start thinking that maybe nuclear energy is the best short-range answer to our energy addiction. Or that I’d ever read an entire book on a screen.

I don’t know the answer, but I am deeply invested in the question. So, ads in ebooks. As readers and writers, what is your opinion?

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The Old Fart Writing Convention

It's been fascinating to watch the uneasy boundaries shift and sway on every frontier of the Ebook Revolution. The uninformed opinions, the narrow-minded perceptions inflated to universal wishes, the selective experiences designed to affirm a certain outcome of what the future will look like...

No, this isn't a publishing industry rant. At this point, the industry deserves sympathy, not vitriol.

I am talking about the "experienced" writers who formerly used their platform to warn against all the perils of traditional publishing and have suddenly become self-publishing experts. You know, the ones who used to sit on the Old Fart Writing Convention panel and stay stupid stuff like "The money always flows toward the writer" while they themselves gave 85 percent to a publisher and an additional 15 percent to an agent. That's like having your mouth at the bottom crack at the far end of the trough, even though it was the only meal in town.

Those writers were among the first to frown at self-publishing. Indeed, another Old Fart panel staple was "Never self-publish." Then, when self-published writers were kicking their asses in sales, and the Kindle catapulted unknown writers over those who had been laboring on contract work for decades, they blinked and looked around, wondering why nobody was sitting before the Old Fart panel anymore.

The reason was because everyone was across the hall in the "How to Self-Publish" panel. The Old Farts, seeing their panel had been abandoned, went to the doorway to peek in. No, they couldn't enter, because this was turf they didn't rule. Entering would be admitting they were out of date and their time maybe had passed. Worse, that their advice was not only worthless, it was actually harmful.

With time, the Old Farts went in and sat in the back room of Self-Publishing, and soon worked their way up to the front seats. By making comparative judgments based on their "experience" ("Blah blah self-publishing should work like THIS because THIS is how publishing used to work. You need to go from A to B to C."), soon the Old Farts were back on the panel. After so many decades, it was assumed they had knowledge. However, it was like Copernicus trying to explain Hawking's theories, something based on an entirely different set of rules that were still inventing themselves.

Unfortunately for anyone who takes Old Fart advice, publishing books hasn't gone from A to B to C. It jumped to D-and-a-half. The writers who had no traditional publishing experience started at D and moved ahead of all the "experienced" writers. The Old Farts are still hanging on to B because it more closely links them to A, an era where A mattered and they mattered. The writers at D-and-a-half don't have any use for A advice, and the newer D writers who listen to A advice tend to move back to B or C.

Heck, I'm kind of an Old Fart myself at this point, even though I'm not enough of one to star on an Old Fart Writing Convention panel. And I am probably wrong about what's going to happen with ebooks and writers. But I'm equally sure the other Old Farts are probably wrong. If it comes down to it, I'm going to trust my D experience and tune out A, B, and C.

I guess the only advice this Old Fart has to offer today is to not listen to Old Farts. Let them serve you drinks in the hospitality suite, nod at their war stories, and then go to back to your room and create E, F, and G.

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Five sips of Indie Kool-Aid

One of the core themes of my inspirational guide The Indie Journey: Secrets To Writing Success is "Don't expect tomorrow to look like today." A lot of indie writers are making big decisions based on the expectation that the world will remain exactly the same, which is contrary to the experience of every one of us who have lived on this planet. Here are things that could and almost certainly will affect the indie future:

1. "I'll get 70 percent forever!" Yes, and those tech stocks in the 1990s just kept shooting through the roof, didn't they? The housing market of four years ago was unstoppable, too.

2. "There will be more and more markets in the future, so competition will keep retailers offering good terms." There will be one winner who basically sets the terms for everybody. Look at Apple for music and games apps if you need convincing.

3. "Library lending opens a whole new market!" Well, actually, it may CLOSE markets. If people can check out your ebook from home, and a library only needs one digital copy, you will be very lucky to get one sale per library. That's a lot of libraries, but also no reason for anyone ever to buy your book again from a retailer.

4. "Advertising will support ebooks so  companies will pay writers to be featured in their books." It's likely advertisers will pay retailers and distributors, not the authors. No one knows what this will look like, or how revenues will be split--or even if there will be writer revenues at all. Think of the YouTube music video where you sit through the 15-second ad first.

5. "So-and-so promised all indie authors will be rich." We usually hear what we want to hear. Lottery stories are cool. But the lottery is only cool because almost nobody wins it. Including you and me.

Mantra: Since the future will be different, why not be happy now and be prepared to be happy tomorrow?

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What are you willing to do?

A thread in the Kindle Boards forum asked authors "What are you willing to do (or give up) to be a successful writer?"

I already feel like a successful writer because I am taking steps to find whatever audience I deserve. I had six books on the shelves (one is still clinging to the late stages of being in print), and I never was able to "quit the day job," but the money from Act I of my career helped get me a house. I measure success differently these days, because I am already pretty content with my life, though I do have the goal of cutting out that trip to the office every day.

Self-publishing books for me are not a way to get attention, assuage my ego, or get instant gratification. I have over 500 rejection slips and I still get them. I still want to publish in a major press. But now I have a baseline for what my work is worth and what the rights are worth. I believe this is a viable foundation for a lasting career, because I can track how much income I can expect to make and how many books it would take to make a living. My sales have increased to the point where having six novels out would equal my take-home pay from my day job. Of course, this ebook enterprise doesn't have a retirement plan or health insurance. If the U.S. adopted nationalized health care, I'm sure I would join the hundreds of thousands of people who would immediately follow their dreams instead of taking the "safe route."

Well, no route is safe. Amazon could cut a deal today with major publishers and drop all indie authors. The continued recession could lead to the death of $250 handheld reading devices. Ebooks could become seen as free content and few writers would even stay in business. Ebooks could evolve into interactive experiences requiring large and skilled production staffs, adding audio and video, that make printing and shipping a paper book look like a walk in the park. The ebook market could reach the saturation point when most every book ever printed floods the market in the next few years.

There are no guarantees, and even the experts are already weeks or months behind what is actually happening in the trenches. All I know is to act on the evidence I see before me: Publish X number of novels and get X number of sales per month and earn X dollars. Publish in New York to stay visible and reach the paper audience, because it is the ebook audience of the future. Write stories without regard to narrow commercial considerations, because now they are lasting works of art instead of three-month shelf products. Write without bitterness over an industry that some feel conspires to keep writers locked out.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch's excellent blog "Freelance Survival Guide" muses on the various business considerations of the writing life, as well as the ephemeral notions of success. She says it much more succinctly than I can but the gist is success will change over the course of your life and career. For me, there are measurable goals of sales, income, and the reaching, serving, and satisfying of an audience. But no check I've ever received has matched that feeling of typing the last line of a story and sitting there all sick and shivery and tense and dewy-eyed and whispering, "Nailed it."

There is only one thing I'm willing to do to be a successful writer: write.

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