The New Gatekeepers by Mark Chisnell
In October last
year I wrote a post called ‘Gatekeepers and Validators’ which was subsequently
chosen for 'Sparks, A Year In E-Publishing - An Authors Electric Anthology2011-2012’.
The gist of it was that there had been a power-shift in publishing. Twenty
years ago, just a couple of handfuls of people in London and New York decided
what the English-speaking public got to read. They were the editors, marketers
and accountants of the ‘Big Six’ publishing houses, and the book buyers for the
centralised bookselling chains.
If these people
didn’t like a book, then there was precious little chance that anybody would
ever read it. They controlled the gates to the front tables of Waterstones, WH
Smiths, Borders, and Barnes and Noble. Without their approval and validation -
and without a place on those tables - the number of books that an author would
likely sell would be counted in dozens, rather than tens of thousands.
This situation has
changed completely; Borders has gone, Barnes and Noble looks sickly, Random
House and Penguin have merged and any writer that can’t get their work accepted
by the big London and New York publishers can go to a fabulous range of new
independent houses. Or they can simply do it themselves, via the direct sales
channel to the reader that’s now been opened by Amazon, B&N, Kobo, Apple
and other online sellers, using a myriad of ePublishing and Print on
Demand services.
The central
argument of that previous blog is summed up by this passage; ‘The gatekeepers are gone and the doors have
been blown wide open - the slush-pile has moved from the in-tray of editors and
agents, got itself a cover and a blurb and is now available online for the
princely sum of 99p a pop. Or it’s free. Unfortunately, even if the notion of
validation by the traditional gatekeepers was just smart business by big
corporations, it still leaves us with the original problem. How do we decide
what’s worth reading?’
My answer - just
over six months ago - was simple; ‘The new validators are the people who should
have had the job in the first place – the readers. Perhaps that’s why we are
all fast ceasing to care about books getting the imprimatur of a publisher’s
imprint. An endorsement of quality no longer needs to come from an editor in
New York or London; it can come from five stars on Amazon. It can come when a
complete stranger living several thousand miles away takes the trouble to write
and post a four paragraph analysis and review of your book on B&N.com.
If a week is a long
time in politics, then six months is an eon in the current publishing industry.
I think that my earlier conclusion is now starting to appear a little naive... some new gatekeepers are emerging. I mentioned on the comments to a previous post that I might try advertising on Bookbub, as I
had heard good things about it. I continued to hear
good things about it, and ran a 99c sale promotion for The Defector with
Bookbub at the beginning of May. The results on Amazon.com were good, hitting
the top #400 on the paid chart. Much more interesting though was the result on
B&N.com – a sales channel I’ve never got anywhere near cracking. Bookbub
got The Defector into the top #100 overall, and eventually the book topped out
at #58 - even briefly outselling '50 Shades...'
How do they do it? Bookbub
is a very simple idea, whose commercial beauty comes from its huge scale. If
you go to the website you will be given the chance to sign up for a daily email
that will provide five or six suggestions for discounted books. It’s possible
to tailor the email to specific genres. An author can sign up to be one of the
promotional books in this email for any given genre.
So far, so what, I
hear you say... There are probably dozens of websites doing this sort of thing.
What makes Bookbub special? Two things; firstly, I mentioned the scale: 1
million subscribers. And the second is that they put some real editorial effort
into the books that they promote. If they don’t think it’ll sell, they won’t
run the advert.
It's spectacularly effective, but Bookbub aren’t the
only game in town. The top end of the ‘Free’ Charts on Amazon are usually dominated by whatever books Pixel of Ink and Ereader NewsToday happen to be promoting that day. Both of these websites are also picky
about the books they list, and are also effective at pushing a book up the paid
list. BookBub is just the first that I’ve seen that
has some leverage at B&N. I suspect that this will soon extend - or maybe
it already does - to the iBookstore and Kobo.
A handful of
websites are now sufficiently powerful that they can push a book into the sales
charts. So maybe these are the new gatekeepers? Fortunately, happy readers
are still the only thing that will keep it there...
Twitter: http://twitter.com/markchisnell
Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/markchisnell
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