TomBritt.com Online Marketing Blog

Disguised as “faster shipping and fulfillment”, Amazon announced this week that all print on demand book titles sold by Amazon MUST be printed by them (BookSurge.com). They claim:

If the POD printing machines reside inside our own fulfillment centers, we can more quickly ship the POD book to customers — including in those cases where the POD book needs to be married together with another item. If a customer orders a POD item together with an item that we’re holding in inventory — a common case — we can quickly print and bind the POD item, pick the inventoried item, and ship the two together in one box, and we can do so quickly. If the POD item were to be printed at a third party, we’d have to wait for it to be transhipped to our fulfillment center before it could be married together with the inventoried item.

Hmm, I wonder how many orders are “transhipped” (is that a word by the way?) with other items in their fulfillment center? Lighting Source, owned by Ingram which is the United State’s largest retail book distributor, has been printing and “transhipping” books for Amazon for years. Each book is put into an Amazon box, Amazon packing slip, and shipped on Amazon’s account. I guess Amazon isn’t making enough money on shipping and handling fees, their 35%+ commission, and cross-selling (or “trans-selling”) their CreateSpace.com or other publishing services.

The result of their strong-arm, take-it-or-leave-it tactics will be simple: Smaller, stubborn, or defiant self-publishing companies will die and Amazon will feed them to BookSurge.com. PublishAmerica might be the first to go, their executives claim:

PublishAmerica will not comply with Amazon’s ultimatum, and will not allow that company to dictate who will print PublishAmerica’s books, and at what conditions.

Xlibris is reported to have not signed an agreement with Amazon yet, either. The first self-publishing company could be the last if they don’t wise up and work something out. Business is business, fall in line to the 800 lb. gorilla or be fed to the BookSurge giant.

It’s rumored that AuthorHouse/iUniverse has reached a deal with Amazon. The market leader understands how the publishing industry is changing and is looking out for the best interests of their authors.

Be defiant all you want. Custer was defiant. Charles Manson is still defiant. Look at what it got them. Bad news PublishAmerica: You and your authors need Amazon more than they need you. As of the writing of this blog post, your 23,000+ books are basically turned “off” on Amazon. Unfortunately, no one has challenged Amazon for years in book sales because they were:

1. An online market leader, and
2. They worked well in their ecosystem of book sales and distribution

Now, they have gotten a little greedy and believe that they alone can provide anything and everything that a self-published author would want, including the printing. Amazon could be cutting off their own nose in an industry that has become more and more fragmented over the last 10 years. By turning on their own in an economic ecosystem that seemed to work for everyone, Amazon could and should see some publishers ally to form online bookstores that rival their catalog of books.

If Amazon is so concerned with the customers’ “speed of shipping experience,” why remove the “buy now” button and decrease the speed of buying a book? They have prided themselves on the “one click” purchase experience and spent millions of dollars to protect it legally. Why play hardball in a stadium full of publishers that used to support you and make it harder for them to sell books through your store?

In closing, I have two recommendations:

1. AuthorHouse/iUniverse and company needs to develop a new and improved e-bookstore and go head to head with Amazon on book sales. Charge them a premium and force them to join some hokey advantage program to sell BookSurge books through your new portal. Your own authors and the industry at large will thank you for it.
2. Amazon needs to stick to selling books and leave the distribution, printing, and fulfillment to willing partners like Lightning Source. You aren’t kidding anyone with this “speed of shipping experience” and “transhipping” speak.

Amazon finally released their Amazon Kindle e-book reader device, a clunky ’stone tablet’ looking device that doubles as a wireless laptop hybrid device. I have to say I’m a little disappointed in the design, but not the functionality. Instead of taking the ”book-like” trac that Sony took with their reader digital book, Amazon took the “techno gadget” road and debuts with an ugly, oversided PDA with built-in wireless. To add insult to injury, they are charging $9.95 for most book titles which is more than I pay for the used books on Amazon.

If I was Amazon, I would not have targeted e-book readers with this thing, I would have targeted Blackberry users that want another keyboard and screen to tantalize them all day. I’ll wait until the next model comes out that allows for wireless air cards (Sprint, T-Mobile, etc.) and has a color monitor. Thanks Amazon for not advancing the e-book market any further than it already was.

Until a few years ago, the term self-publishing usually entailed the likes of AuthorHouse, iUniverse, or Infinity Publishing taking a raw manuscript and converting it into a printed book via print on demand. Nowadays, self-publishing is being redefined as a “do-it-yourself publishing” process where you go online, upload your manuscript, format it, and then use print on demand to print and fulfill book orders.

One of the first in this space was Lulu.com who boasts over 10,000 new accounts per week. Unfortunately, the process was either deemed too hard or too confusing for most users with only a handfull of the 10,000 actually completing their book online. Beyond the printing, Lulu doesn’t offer too many other services beyond an ISBN and distribution at a cost.

Amazon even threw their hat in the ring with the debut of CreateSpace.com. Like Lulu.com, they provide an online process whereby a user can create their own book and sell it through Amazon.com. Again, the wheels fall off when an aspiring author realizes that designing their own cover or text pages is a little more difficult than what they thought. Don’t get me wrong, I love the idea, but it’s the devil in the details that cause many authors heartburn when it comes to this new self-publishing model.

In my opinion, AuthorSolutions‘ Wordclay.com has a leg up on both of these established brands. AuthorHouse and iUniverse are well-versed in helping people along the process to becoming published. Besides, AuthorHouse has more marketing services to offer than anyone in this space which is always the lynchpin in any successful book. Like CreateSpace.com, Wordclay.com can give you Amazon.com distribution as well as visibility to any of the 25,000 retailers in the United States that subscribe to Ingram’s feed.

If you are publishing a wedding book, a reunion scrapbook, or other book where distribution is not a factor AND you are pretty tech savvy, it will come down to ease of use and pricing. If you are doing this new self-publishing model for the first time and you are willing to admit that you are a better writer than you are marketer and layout artist, then Wordclay.com might just be for you.

I was reading an interesting article today in Time Magazine entitled “One Day in America.” A few interesting stats are quoted in the article:

At some point today you will say a prayer, not floss, take a shower for 10 minutes but not sing in it, drive an eight-year-old car to work, spend 95% of the day indoors and 2 1⁄2 hours online, consume 20 teaspoons of added sugar and not save any money. On weekends, people over 75 spend 1 1⁄2 hours reading, while those from 15 to 19 spend seven minutes.

True, kids are spending less time reading newspapers and books, but 1-1/2 hours vs. 15-19 minutes? I would have to imagine that these stats don’t include the time kids spend reading profiles and posts on myspace.com or facebook.com.

Another interesting parallel, people are spending on average 2-1/2 hours per day online, almost double the time that 75 year-olds spend reading on weekends.

The wild wild west of self-publishing has a new marshall in town: AuthorHouse and iUniverse.

According to Publishers Weekly, there are an estimated 86,000 self-publishing companies in the United States. With over 200,000 new titles per year flooding the book market, primarily because of self-publishing, consolidation of the space is a good thing for everyone.

As I travel around the country talking to aspiring and published authors, I hear horror stories about various publisher dealings. One guy self-published with a company, paid his fees, and never saw a galley: the business went bankrupt before they could finish his book. Another author published with a company, the company closed its doors, and now he can’t even get his files from the publisher to keep it active at Lightning Source. Another company in Indiana sold an “authorfest” book show to their authors at Franklin College, only to have four people show up (three of them were authors that paid to exhibit).

AuthorHouse has been the 500 lb. gorilla in the self-publishing space for several years now. With nearly 30,000 active titles in Amazon, their closest competitor has been iUniverse with just over 17,000 active titles. Everyone else is a distant third in size, which doesn’t mean they can’t help you get published, they just don’t have the experience and breadth of services that an AuthorHouse or iUniverse has.

I’ve had a few people comment that AuthorHouse and iUniverse merged to run everybody out of business. Not necessarily. I think both parties felt that the industry can benefit from having an undisputed market leader in a space that has less than stellar reviews over the last 10 years. Lifting the visibility, reputation, quality, distribution, and overall perception of self-publishing will help everyone, including their competitors.

To take AuthorHouse’s position as a market leader a step further, they launched WordClay.com quietly a few months ago. True “self-publishing” has really taken hold at Lulu.com and AuthorHouse wants to extend into that online “do-it-yourself” space. Thousands of free accounts are started on Lulu.com each week with a small percentage of those actually finishing their book’s design, layout, and cover design. People find out that laying out a book isn’t as easy as they thought. Lulu.com is a pure online play, meaning all their services are available online with no or little offline support.

In comes AuthorHouse with a headquarters in Bloomington, Indiana with nearly 180 employees that are eagerly waiting for someone to raise a white flag in WordClay.com to help them finish their book. Need your manuscript edited? How about a fancier cover design? Or maybe you need some illustrations for your children’s book? AuthorHouse/iUniverse can help you fill in the gaps of your “do-it-yourself” publishing experience.

Keep an eye on the self-publishing industry in the coming months and years. As the smaller shops either close their doors or align themselves with printers, we’ll look back at the moves AuthorHouse has made in the last 6 months as a good thing for the entire industry: most importantly the authors themselves.

I’ve been waiting to write up a review on www.zoho.com until the short-term honeymoon was over. After all, a free online solution to every business’s CRM, database, project management, wiki creator, web conferencing and presentation, calendar, polling, and every other imaginable need in one place seems too good to be true.

But, it’s true!

I originally came across zoho.com in my weekly quest to find a decent CRM tool to manage my sales pipeline, monthly customer reminders, and track leads. Finding Zoho CRM was like finding a $100 bill in an old pair of pants. I was using Google for CRM (Etelos), another stand alone online CRM tool built on the iGoogle.com platform. While Etelos was free as well, they have problems with the new iGoogle platform and they are not owned by Google (at least not now anyways) so displaying your widgets on your iGoogle.com page is hit and miss. They seem to have server issues or too much code; your information is not readily available sometimes during the day. Etelos integrates with Google’s calendaring, tasks, gmail, and other features, but then again you can do this without Etelos as well.

In came zoho.com.

I can’t say enough about the ease of use, functionality, and scalability of this great online service. Every week, they are adding more instructional videos, testing new things, and rolling out new services.

Today I checked the site as I’m writing this post and notice they have zoho on Facebook, zoho documents on your iPhone, a zoho widget you can place on your desktop, a Microsoft Outlook plugin, a website monitoring service, and a D&B reporting service in beta. If you have a small business or a home office business like mine where you are sharing data, sales leads, or employees outside of your four walls, zoho.com can solve a lot of problems.

I’m happy to see they are testing a new “dashboard” for all their services. This will help me consolidate all the different products that I’m using into one screen. Currently, you have to login to each of their services separately (which I hate to even complain about).

For authors trying to promote their books on Amazon.com, a solution is on the horizon: Clickriver ads. Much like the infamous Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing programs, Clickriver looks to deliver targeted pay per click advertising on Amazon.com for anyone selling products or services (including books!). While the program is in beta right now, look for a full release in late August. In the meantime, learn from your Google and Yahoo! campaigns and sign up for Clickriver now so you can be the first to bid on search terms around your book’s subject and/or genre.

Honestly, you can publish your blog as a book. Really.

This might seem a little nutty, but you can actually import your Live Journal, TypePad.com, or Wordpress blog into the Blurb.com BookSmart software and create one or many copies of your blog in the form of a book.

Why would anyone want to do that? Isn’t that the reverse of how most authors work? Before you know it, authors will be polishing their online manuscripts, er blogs, for the world to see. Bloggers will lend free editing advice, critique the third paragraph for saying “undoubtedly” too many times, or point out character confusion in the dialogue. Then, the online author will download this BookSmart software, import the final product from their blog, and (here’s the drumroll) pay $40.00 for one copy of the book in softcover (given that it is a 200 page book). Want it in hardcover? Oh, that’s only $47.95. Chicken feed for a blog book that you can’t get anywhere else but, well, I guess on a blog for free online.

Okay, you got me.

Wedding books, photo books for an anniversary, or grandma’s personal cookbook for the family…maybe. But publishing a blog to a book?

I admit, it has gotten Blurb.com quite a bit of press, but I’d love to know how much of their business has been made on $40.00 blog books.

I got this email from Google Book Search about a significant upgrade to their program: reference links to your book.

I’m writing to let you know about some recent upgrades to Google Book Search. These features are designed to make Google Book Search much more comprehensive and useful for users and increase the value of the program as a book discovery tool.

On the “About this Book” page, we’ve added “References to this Book” and links to reviews on the web. If we find that your book is referenced by another book or scholarly work that we’ve scanned in Google Book Search or indexed in Google Scholar, we’ll link to the referring title. In addition, when we find a reference to a book on the web that we think is useful to users, we’ll link to the website. Finally, where possible, we’ve included links to online reviews of the book. See this example: http://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN0395977894

In order to further enhance the user experience, we will be including results from books that we have scanned as well as books in our Bibliographic Information Index. Searching across both of these indexes will make Google Book Search much more comprehensive for users, resulting in a better user experience. This will ensure that Google Book Search continues to improve as a valuable discovery tool for your titles. Books in the Bibliographic Information Index will be presented with “no preview available.” These “no preview available” listings display only basic bibliographic information about the book, as well as the web references and reviews that we’ve found. Because we have not scanned the books, such results will only appear when the user’s query matches the title, author, or other basic information about the book.

Now, when a user searches for a book or a topic in Book Search, not only do they get the benefit of discovering books by searching across the full text, but they also will receive information about other books which, based on the title or other bibliographic information, may contain the information they’re seeking.

We welcome your feedback as we continue to improve Google Book Search and make it more comprehensive and useful.

Buying television ads through broadcast and cable networks is a lot easier these days thanks to SpotRunner.com. The old days of calling each television station, meeting with reps, shooting commercials, and paying for “branding” ads that you hoped would generate a few calls at 2:00 am are over. Certainly, cable television has changed the way network ads are bought and sold, but SpotRunner has taken it to a whole new level.

The first hurdle that SpotRunner.com solves is the lack of professional quality video for commercials. They inventory hundreds of canned commercials for all types of businesses. Just search their database by keyword or industry and watch generic videos online to find your next commercial. Once you have picked one out, you simply upload your logo and company information and SpotRunner.com customizes the audio track and puts your logo and company information in the commercial.

The second hurdle that SpotRunner.com helps you overcome is access to any and all broadcast and cable networks around the country. You can search and select networks by area, MSA, channel, and even select airtime preferences…all online! That’s right, you can become your own placement agency.

Most importantly, they allow you to place your own ads, schedule your airtime, create your own budget, and pay for the ads all online. This is truly a self-directed, or self-published, model for television commercials.

If you need some help, no problem. SpotRunner has a staff of sales people that can provide assistance over the phone. If you want to place an ad, need help creating an ad that is not on SpotRunner, or want to help Tom Britt out (who doesn’t, right?), send me a note and I can purchase your ads for you and they pay me 5%. Don’t worry, I won’t charge you to help but I can get a commercial cut for you if you like at an additional fee.