How Important Is The Book Launch?

The book launch. How important is it for success?

In some circles of writers, there is a lot of talk about book launches. Certainly in the traditionally published world, book launches can be a vehicle for promotion. A book’s launch period is the time where it sits in a prominent position on the bookshelf before the industry decides whether it’s going to sink or swim. The book launch itself is a swanky party usually in a bookshop where the author invites their friends and the publisher invites industry people.

But how about when you self publish a book?

Is the book launch going to influence how well it sells down the track?

We all know that e-books are forever, and when you self publish, the bulk of your sales are likely to be in e-book.

I don’t know any buyer who looks at the year of publication when they purchase a book. So in theory, a book can sell just as well regardless of when it was published.

It is true however that Amazon favours recently published books, so there is some merit in trying to use that tendency.

But it is also entirely possible to keep the book afloat by constant low-level promotion.

It is even possible to renew interest in a book by promoting a book that is already a couple of years old. Most retail sites determine the likelihood of recommending a book to readers by how much it has sold in the previous month, so it is highly possible to spike your own sales by running a promotion that places it in a better position. You can do this at launch, but there is nothing that says that you can’t do it when the book is already a couple of years old.

So how much effort should you spend for your book launch?

I have to admit that I am of the opinion that whatever I do for the book launch should not take me away from writing the next book.

Other than that, I will usually spend a bit more effort if the book is the first book in the series, because I am trying to get interest in the series and I may be trying to get people to pre-order the next book after they have read the first one.

If the book is a second or sad or later book in a series, I concentrate my main efforts of marketing on the first book of the series, and then market the new book to the people who have shown interest in the first book. For those later books, my mailing list is the main advertising vehicle.

There are people who go all out on the book launches with Facebook parties and launch promotions. This can definitely get you some sales, but in the end, you have to weigh up the amount of time and money spent to judge whether or not it is worth it.

A good launch can make your book sell for longer, but it is entirely possible to revive and old book or keep a book selling at a lower level with ads that don’t require terribly much maintenance.

The book launch is not so important for self published writers as it is for traditionally published writers. A book in a bookshop gets six weeks to three months before the bookseller decides whether or not it has been successful and re-orders the book or returns and sold copies to the publisher and never orders it again. The publisher will also not promote older books.

As self-published writers, we don’t have the expectations of the first three months to deal with. Our books are on virtual shelves and always available. We can sit back at launch, run some ads, but otherwise concentrate on the next book.

This is a major advantage that we have over traditionally published authors.

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Mailing Lists Will Stop Working

A lot of crystal ball gazing for this year made by various people has included the prediction that mailing lists will stop working. Everyone is complaining that people are getting too much email and the author mailing list will stop being so effective because readers have subscribed to too many newsletters. Readers have told them so, and therefore it must be true.

How many readers told them this? Oh, one or two. But “everyone” is saying it.

Ok, you can feel my sarcasm now.

What is really going on?

In the past few years, we have seen a lot of authors jumping onto the mailing list bandwagon. They did competitions, they did Facebook ads, they did mailing list swaps, and huge variety of schemes which concentrated on fast tracking their mailing list building.

All of a sudden, a lot of authors had huge mailing lists without ever having given any thought on what to do with these people on their list. So they did what you would normally do with an author mailing list: they started emailing them when they had new books out. Surprise surprise, these people did not buy their books. Huge lots of them even unsubscribed or reported the emails as spam. On top of that, a lot of authors increased their list while using expensive mailing services, so while on one hand their list was not buying their books, on the other hand they were paying a lot to keep all those people there.

I have seen all this happen more often than I can recount.

So therefore the conclusion must be that mailing list don’t work, that people are getting too much email, because some people responded to their emails telling the author so, and therefore that means list building is a thing of the past.

Seriously, what utter rot.

Email and mailing lists in various forms have been around since the beginning of the Internet. If you buy something from online retailer, chances are that you will be receiving the emails about special offers. These days you even get emails when your parcels are put in the mail, when they have been delivered to customs in your country, and when they have been delivered to your house.

People appreciate these emails, so what was this about too much email?

One of things I have learned in the past few years is not to listen to what people say, because it will very often differ markedly from what they do. So, a single reader who complains about getting too much email might just be writing a polite email to all the authors whose emails she is now getting as a result of taking part in a competition. This person is not your true target audience. And of course she is right.

I get it, if people take part in a competition and as a result a hundred authors will be sending them emails, it is likely that a few people get sick of getting so much email that they didn’t realise they would get. You will hear from these people, but you hardly ever get to hear from those who appreciate your emails.

Mailing lists are not about the few complainers, they are about the people who enjoy getting author newsletters. In fact, you want to get rid of the other people as soon as possible because they will never buy your books and they were only there for the contest or the free books that were part of your subscriber drive. Don’t worry about these people. It was never about them. It is about the ones you keep.

People who say that readers are getting too much email and that mailing lists will stop working are using the wrong argument to draw the wrong conclusion. They don’t know how to use email as an effective marketing tool, or how to separate what to send out to which people according to how they arrived on your list. In short: you need to ease competition entrants into your regular newsletter program or even send them completely different material.

The best feature about mailing list providers is that they are required by law to have a prominently displayed unsubscribe button. In fact I suggest that you make that button more prominent. If the subscribers don’t want to be there, you don’t want them there. Celebrate your unsubscribes. Your mailing list is not about people who unsubscribe, it is about the people who stay and start reading and buying your books because they sound cool or because you entertain them.

People who become your fans expect to be able to stay in contact with you. To email them about a new release is a great way of getting a good spike in sales when you book releases. To ask them questions about what you should do with the book’s storyline, to ask for title suggestions, or to name characters in your book after them is a great way of making them feel personal about your writing.

The author mailing list is the only tool that the author controls.

But make no mistake, getting signups from the back of the book and aggressive recruiting strategies like competitions and Facebook are two entirely different animals. There are tactics and philosophies attached to both of them and they do not mix. It is people who do not understand this who make comments about author mailing lists no longer working, and people are getting too much email. They say this, because they don’t understand the different mechanisms and strategies. They say this, because they have used the wrong strategies for the wrong group, and have held the wrong expectations for the wrong type of lists. And they’re impatient.

My entire business is built on my mailing list. Without it, my sales would be very small. I have taken care to build my list to include people who I want, and have done my best to sift out the rest. All it takes is an understanding of the tactics, patience and time.

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The comments on this blog are closed, but this post is syndicated to my Facebook page, where you can comment and ask further questions. Find more information about the Three-year plan self-publishing books here.

The dreaded M word

The mention of the word marketing gives a lot of writers hives.

I think this is mostly because they misunderstand what is meant by marketing. They think that marketing means shouting buy my book on Facebook and Twitter. They think that marketing means sleazy tactics and mentioning your own book at every available opportunity, whether appropriate or not.

They remember when they went to a con and a writer on a panel sat down at the speaker table and displayed all his books in front of him, they thought it looked silly, and they desperately didn’t want to be like that.

The news is that you don’t have to do this at all. Schlepping your books is not marketing. Schlepping your books is ick. Effective marketing is both fun and smart. It’s fun because, having created the product, marketing is where you get to see the sales and make the money. It is where you can make the difference between seeing almost no return to gaining a healthy income, if your book does its job.

Effective marketing is to position in your book in places where people will naturally find it. Marketing is to display your book in a way so that people who normally like those types of books will be intrigued and prepared to give it a try.

You are right to be turned off by the hard selling author, and there are not many good reasons for doing this. If fact I would say it turns most people off.

Marketing isn’t even about doing promotions and holding sales, although some of it can be. But promotions and sales are nothing if there is no tactic behind them. If you promote the first book in your series, you hope that people will buy the rest at full price, because that’s where you make the money. If you give away free books for people to sign up to your mailing list, and you will have their address for new releases and develop a better relationship with your readers, which, if done well, will result in increased sales.

Your cover is marketing. Your blurb is marketing. The way you interact and do promotions with other authors is marketing. Marketing is purely about finding where you audiences are and making it possible for them to find your books. Most of this is done behind the scenes.

Marketing is not sleazy. Selling can be sleazy. Marketing is not selling.

Writing the book is only one part of the equation. Once you have written the book, it would be silly not to try to position it so that people can find it and if they like the sound of it, buy it. That is marketing. That is where the fun begins.

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The comments on this blog are closed, but this post is syndicated to my Facebook page, where you can comment and ask further questions. Find more information about the Three-year plan self-publishing books here.

Trends in self-publishing in 2018

The end of the year always offers time for reflection, and I make no exception for this blog. Here are some trends I see coming in 2018.

More people going wide or diversifying income
As the market becomes more mature, people who are interested in a lasting writing career will realise that they need to diversify to spread risk particularly in relation to the second point in this post. This could mean taking books to more distributors, but also doing print and audio and branching out into different genres, different pen names, or creating another income stream from non-fiction, crowdfunding, direct sales or providing services.
This is necessary because…

Amazon will continue to do things that will make sense only to Amazon (and even that could be debated)
And who knows what it will be?
In 2017, writers in Select saw their page reads spectacularly eroded through page flip. And we saw that Amazon doesn’t care that it can’t tell how many pages a reader has read.
We also saw Amazon taking a publicity hit when a scammed book went to #1 in the store. Of course, in Amazon-style, they responded extremely heavy-handed, punishing legit writers. I know they cancelled a bunch of dubious accounts as well, so that’s something at least. But there was a fair bit of collateral damage.
Amazon is known to use a sledgehammer when all they need is a screwdriver.
For us, it’s a constant battle, so…

People will give up
I’ve seen the tone in self-publishing forums change markedly in the last year or so. It’s no longer super-buoyant. People realise that this gig is a lot of WORK. Some don’t want to do it. They will quietly disappear. They will realise that they’ve written the one book everyone is said to have in them and move on to basketweaving.
For the rest of us…

More people will have a go at selling books direct
OK, I already set up my web store, mostly for ebook cover design, but with Bookfunnel, we now have a secure ebook delivery mechanism that doesn’t include having to provide the reader with instruction on how to put the book on their device. So more people will start doing this. How successful they are remains to be seen, because discoverability is an issue. I see this function valuable for large collections and special material for fans.
But to continue in this vein…

Bookbub will take steps to start selling books
OK, this one is a little bit out there, but why not? With Amazon eroding affiliate income, it makes sense for Bookbub to retain a higher percentage of the cut and start selling direct to customers.
Which brings me to…

A reduction in the number of rented lists
Anyone who says that the efficiency of “rented” lists (Freebooksy, Bargain Booksy, Ereader News Today, Free Kindle Books & Tips) has declined markedly is not dreaming. I’m not entirely sure what is to blame, but my guess is poor curation could be part of the problem. For some of these lists, you only need a credit card to join the fun. It’s a pay-to-play environment, and that benefits no one.
These lists should be curating what they feature, not rely on lazy-arse selection through “star ratings”, but actually, y’know, look at the books that are submitted, and only feature books that meet their criteria. Anything else might make a little bit more money in the short term, but is otherwise just shooting themselves in the foot.
So my prediction is that some of these sites will have to reinvent themselves or bite the dust.
For authors, it means finding new ways to promote…

More people will jump on the collaboration bandwagon
If the hot buzz last year was author cross-promotion, this year it’s co-writing. Since output is the name of the game (to some people at least), what is better than to write and publish twice as fast with someone else? Nothing, in theory, and so people will jump on the co-writing bandwagon in order to make millions…
Except when they don’t.
Realise that it is a bandwagon and that the head of the column—where the most profitable deals are—has already passed.
If you want to collaborate, nothing is stopping you. Just make sure you do it for the right reasons. Making a metric butt-tonne of money is not a reason.
And also…

Some multi-author collaborations will explode. Spectacularly. Like, in a take-me-to-court fashion
I’m seeing some stuff that gives me hives. While it seems fine to try to publish a book with a friend, what happens if tensions arise over content or payment? What happens if one of the partners suddenly finds spectacular success and resentment builds in both directions? What happens if a partner fails in their commitment through no fault of their own? What happens when a writer realises that the co-writing contract they signed is poor and/or exploitative?
Pleaseplease, if you co-write, make sure you have a proper contract. Please ask the hard questions before the difficult situations present themselves. What if someone can’t do it anymore? What if one partner wants out? How are you going to make the accounting transparent to all involved? What if one of you gets hit by a bus? Before you embark on a co-writing project, run the contract past someone with a strong BS meter and ask them to poke holes in it.
But to close off…

Some things never change. Keep writing the best books you can. Attempt to own and control as much of your audience as you can. Sales are cool. Readers on your mailing list are better. Don’t rely on the retailers to market for you. Learn to do it yourself. No one is going to care as much about your work as you do.

The comments on this blog are closed, but this post is syndicated to my Facebook page, where you can comment and ask further questions. Find more information about the Three-year plan self-publishing books here.

Relaunching books–when does it make sense?

In a previous post, I said something about the wisdom of relaunching your book when it is your first book and you’re beginning writer. I cautioned against spending too much time and money on a book that still has significant flaws because you may need to learn more about the craft.
But there are definitely situations where relaunching your book makes a lot of sense. When would that be?

In that post, I also mentioned that the time to relaunch your first book would be after you have written a couple of additional books. When you are certain that you have learned enough to write an engaging story that people want to read, that is when you go back to the first book, and use what you have learned about writing, editing and cover design to fix up the book, especially when you have a second book in that series ready to go.

This is the most common way in which we see people successfully re-launching books, but it cannot be done in a vacuum. Just re-launching a single book is probably not going to be terribly effective, but it is a lot more effective if it goes hand-in-hand with the launch of a second book in the same series.

So what would be the best way of going about a relaunch?

If you have a first book that is just sitting there gathering digital dust, the cover is not terribly ideal, the editing was not that great, you may want to take it down if you plan on writing a second book and then relaunching both as s series.

Another reason to relaunch your book may be because you want to change the genre it is in. You may not be editing your book, but changing everything about the packaging to make it more in line with the new genre you are targeting. New title, new cover, new blurb.

Other reasons could include change your pen-name, re-organising your series of rebranding your covers.

Almost all of this type of stuff is done when you have a number of books and you want to fix up your first book or bring it up to speed with the other books.

Relaunches can be quite successful, but they work best if you treat the books like a new product. Change the title and change the cover and to make sure you have a whole series of books for people to buy.

This means not simply copying the new version of the book over the other version, but taking the old version down completely and re-launching as a new book with some ads and announcements to your mailing list.

Relaunching can work very well, but you need to have a plan, because just putting a new cover on an old book is unlikely to have much effect.

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Should you pay for Amazon or Bookbub followers?

Lately, we’ve seen a lot of promotions coming up that help you get followers on Amazon or Bookbub.

“Followers on Amazon?” you ask. “I didn’t even know that was a thing.”

Yes, you can follow an author through the little button under the “buy” button that says: do you want to hear when this author has a new book out and on the Bookbub site it is pretty much the same.

So, when you have a new release, the site will email to all the people who have clicked that button that you have a new book out. That’s a good idea, right?

Well, many authors ask, how do I find out how many followers I have on Amazon? Can I see who they are?

The answer is: you wish.

Bookbub does show you how many followers you have, and how many of those are in the US, but again you don’t have access to their email addresses. If you have more than thousand followers in the US, you can get access to a pre-order announcement service to those followers, but you have to pay for it. Sounds like a money grab? You betcha!

When Amazon sends out a notification that you have a new book, you can definitely see it, especially for pre-orders. They will send out one email to your followers when the book is on pre-order, and they will send another one it is available for sale.

However, they don’t always send out emails (my last three books were ignored by Amazon), and you have no control over when this email goes out.

Bookbub is a lot more reliable about sending emails, but again you have no control over when this happens.

So, you are going to spend money to put my people into this nebulous pile of email addresses that to the list owner may or may not use when you have a new release?

You can probably already tell that I’m not a fan.

Furthermore, if you advertise for these “likes”, a lot of the clicks to your profile are going to be polluted with people who haven’t actually bought your book and who don’t care about what you’ve written, they just wanted to enter the competition. It’s much like taking part in cross promotions where people have to sign up to your list in order to win a prize. With the huge disadvantage that you don’t get their email addresses.

It’s not that I think it is an entirely stupid thing to do. Nor do I think it’s something that will harm you (except you may spend money for not much gain). I think that if you going to pay to get cold leads, as these are called the industry, then actually get the cold leads and get your hands on their email address so you know who they are and you can send them what you like when you like.

The comments on this blog are closed, but this post is syndicated to my Facebook page, where you can comment and ask further questions.

Mailing lists–what about blacklists?

This is for people who take part in multi-author promotions that run a competition where people sign up to be in the draw for a prize. The competition organiser will send you a list of mailing list subscribers. In addition, the organiser may keep a spreadsheet with a blacklist for email addresses who have filed spam reports or have otherwise been abusive.

This would be a good thing, right?

In principle, yes. It happens that competition entrant who has never taken part in any of these competitions didn’t read the fine print, and suddenly they start receiving a whole bunch of emails from authors claiming that they signed up for that mailing list. It happens at these people fly into fits of rage and send abusive emails to everybody.

Yes, seriously, the rudeness of people cannot be underestimated, nor their inability to read (often not so) fine print.

You do not want these people on your list and you would be best to unsubscribe them.

But what about the people who did not email anyone but who, according to someone’s mailing list provider, reported them for spam?

In the past, when I have had such lists provided by competition organisers, I searched for a couple of the addresses, and half the time, I found that some of them are engaged and valued subscribers who open my emails and sometimes even reply to me, or they may even be on my advanced readers team.

So what is up with that?

Well, like opens, spam reports are unreliable. I have had people I know supposedly report me for spam while knowing that they would never have done any such thing.

Internet service providers tend to be very nervous about spam, and while they filter out much of the deluge that washes across the Internet every day, they will also record false positives. Rather a lot of them, even.

So if you get handed a blacklist, I would absolutely remove people who have been in contact with members of your group and have sent them rants or abusive emails. But I would do nothing with people who have reported spam because they may not have deliberately reported anyone for spam at all. They may just have moved the email in the bin, and that can count as a spam report.

So let them come in, and give them an easy unsubscribe option.

If you have proper processes in place, your spam percentage will be quite low anyway, and it’s not worth worrying about if it means that you may also accidentally unsubscribe a good number of loyal readers.

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PSA and reminder for hopeful writers

This needs to be said every now and then:

If someone calls themselves a publisher, you DO NOT PAY them. Ever. End. Of.

A publisher takes risks on your behalf. They invest in the presentation and advertising of your book. They make money from selling that book, not from selling their services to you.

If you want to take on your own risk (aka “self-publishing”), and you do not want to get into the nitty-gritty of the production and marketing process, there are companies that will edit, format and design the book for you. This is a service from them to you, you pay for it, but they do NOT NOT NOT call themselves a publisher.

Why is this so important?

Well, everyone wants their book to sell, right?

Who has the most interest in selling your book? That would be the person who invested in the book, right? If the publisher pays an advance, the saying goes, the bigger advance, the more they’re going to do to advertise it (aka “recoup their investment”).

If you’ve paid to publish (aka “vanity publishing” although they may dress it up as “partnership publishing”), the “publisher” has finished their business commitment once you’ve signed off on the book, have taken delivery of 1000 copies to sit in your garage, once you have purchased their “publicity plan”, and once they have sent out what they agreed to send, their commitment is over. Done.

From that point, you’re on your own, dude, because this “publisher” will care most about signing on the next sucker to be milked. They DGAF about your book and the success or failure thereof. Their business model is to charge you twice, three, four, five times as much for the same stuff you can source yourself, but pretend they are a legit publisher, because “we arrange distribution to bookshops”.

Here’s a hint: EVERYBODY can list their books in catalogues where bookshops can buy. That part is easy.

The hard part is making sure that bookshops actually, you know, order the books.

That is the job of a real publisher. If they’re not out there batting for your book (because they paid you an advance and they bloody well want their money back) then they have zero business calling themselves a publisher.

Do NOT sign with them.

They don’t do anything illegal, but they give you hope that you’re somehow getting the full treatment. If you sign, you are self-publishing. Except you’re being charged far too much for services that, in one case I have seen, are second-rate. As in, the writer handed over thousands and the editing job they got was poor. I could have told the writer numerous places where editing would have cost $500 and would have been of better quality.

They give you the impression that if you buy one of their marketing packages, the book will sell. It won’t.

Lemme tell you this: marketing books is hard.

Marketing books is a long-term commitment and no company will do it beyond some “press releases” and a few ads unless they have money invested in it. A vanity press has recouped its money the moment your book is out the door. They’re done.

They don’t give a fuck.

About your book.

Not a single little fuck.

They’re just looking for the next person with a book.

Don’t deal with these businesses.

Please?

If you want to self-publish, contact me. The comments on this blog are closed, but this post is syndicated to my Facebook page, where you can ask for advice.

Getting hung up on the wrong things

Further to the epic rant I shared last week, I listened to Mark Dawson’s interview with the mysterious Data Guy this morning. I got up at 4am, drove to the city to drop off my husband to the bus to Canberra (where he has a course this week, so has to start early), went back home (still very dark), walked to the gym (scared the bejesus out of a possum in the dark, or maybe it scared me), where it was still very empty at 5.15am. I always listen to podcasts at the gym, because gyms are boring and I can learn something while I’m there.

An interview with Data Guy is a real scoop for the show. I guess Mark knows who he is, but we’re all speculating. In short, every three months, he rents hundreds of servers for an hour or two and they crawl across the entire book section of whatever site he chooses (mostly Amazon US, but he’s done others) and collect publicly visible data. Title, author, publisher, ranking. He does this for an ever-increasing portion of the books for sale. He uses this data to create an immediate snapshot of the industry. The book industry at large is now beginning to see the value of this, because all of the data they can collect does not offer them as complete or immediate a picture.

Data Guy writes the quarterly Author Earnings reports together with Hugh Howey, and these reports give a lot of insight into what’s happening in the book industry. Too much to mention here, but everyone should read them, whether you have a publisher or are self-published. If you’re really keen, the data is publicly available, so you can download it and play with it.

Back to the podcast.

Apart from all the things I mentioned in the rant from last week (people don’t use ISBNs and those books are not counted; people buy even their print books online), I’d like to highlight this quote from the transcript (bolding mine):

James (interviewer):
Is there a particular area do you think you could point people towards they should be looking at?
Data Guy:
Absolutely, and that is marketing and advertising. What is conventionally understood by traditionally published authors to be important absolutely isn’t. Newspaper and radio ads, book signings at the occasional book store, they’re fun. They are enjoyable. I’ve done them. I’ve really enjoyed as an indie author signing at Barnes and Noble. But 70 books in a day in print, where you basically earn very little with your POD books, is not comparable to selling 1,100 or 2,000 books in a day, which is what you can do with an online promotion without too much difficulty if you plan it right. Focus the energy on what works today.

Yet, I see authors getting hung up on in-person sales, signings, presence of their books on shelves, con appearances etc. every day.

This stuff is FUN. It strokes your ego. For sales, it does diddly squat.

Next month, I’ll go to Supanova on the Gold Coast. It’s a tax-subsidised holiday. That’s it. It’s fun. Yet at these events I meet people who don’t even have ebooks. Or who have their ebooks farmed out to daft third party joints that are inflexible and expensive.

Selling print books at stalls or signings is successful when you sell 50 books or more. During my biggest sales day online, I sold 3046 books. In a single day. I can go back the next day and sell 1000, and the next day, and the next day, and…

Ebooks, online, that’s where it’s at. That’s where you should advertise.

Yes, it was still dark when I got home at 6.30. The possum was gone because the rubbish trucks were prowling the streets. We need the end of daylight saving, please?

Patty’s epic rant on the book industry

Last night, I spotted a Guardian article about the supposed decline of ebooks.

When something like this comes up, much handrubbing ensues from the traditional industry. We’ve defeated the beast. Ebooks were a fad. People have seen sense and appreciate the real product.

But what’s actually happening?

Publishers won the right to publish ebooks at the price they choose (and so they should be able to IMO, it’s ludicrous that a retailer should be able to set prices).

But.

The don’t know how to sell ebooks and are not interested in them. Their model is to sell to bookshops, not customers. I had an industry professional tell me a while back that they started reader groups to find out what their readers want. I was going like FFS, you’ve been in the industry for 100 years and you’ve never talked to readers?

But no they haven’t. They sell to bookshops. And people, whether you’re sad or happy, this model is about to come crashing down.

Why?

Because people buy online, not just their ebooks but also their print books.

Why?

Because bookshops don’t have what you’re looking for. An e-retailer can afford to have millions of books in their catalogue. Search it, order, and it’s delivered to your door. Whatever quaint and fuzzy notice you entertain about bookshops, they can’t compete against the juggernaut of the internet with the current model.

Anyway, every now and then, people go into episodes of glee about how ebooks are dying, local bookshops are “fighting back” and how we should stop all the naughty imported booksies.

But.

Bookshops are not dying where they offer extra value. We have a local bookshop (hey, Scott!) which does home deliveries and reading days in nursing homes. I rarely buy there, but a lot of the elderly residents in this area do. Specialisation and excellent service will set these shops apart.

But what is even more insiduous: ebooks aren’t dying at all!

As traditional publishers were allowed to raise their ebook prices to higher than print in some cases, they drove customers to either buy print or buy cheaper ebooks. And, here is the rub:

37% of all ebooks sold are self-published or published by small presses and have no ISBNs and are therefore not counted in the industry roundups produced by Nielsen etc.

So the article in the Guardian is untrue, it misrepresents what is happening in the industry and it pulls the wool over the eyes of many people on the ground, people who have the right to better information so that they can make better decisions for their own future.