Munsey’s Technosnarl

There’s been reports of issues with March updates of publisher revenues at LightningSource.  I understand the concern.  For a couple years there, I structured my life around catching the daily LSI sales report at 1:40 a.m EST.

In addition to technical issues, small publishers have seen a lot of returns, some of books published years ago.  And sales, for a number of publishers, have been… poor, causing them to wonder if there just haven’t been good updates this month.

If you’re a small publisher with LSI, particularly one who works exclusively with LSI, how to put this delicately:

The numbers you’re seeing are pretty much accurate, for the entire month, give or take a day.

Back story here, I’ve mentioned going with Booksurge and Createspace since June.  Last fall, after a chance encounter with a former Ingram employee in Nashville, I reconnected with Replica, finally mailing out the signed contracts (in triplicate) from the Kinko’s at 5th and Congress in Austin, so it’s just possible I’m wrong and my results are unique.

But one of the benefits of my dissolute youth is that I learned how to speak warehouse.  How they operate, etc.  And while nobody’s ever happy working in a warehouse, there are some signals you really gotta pay attention to.  And what I heard from that employee… concerned me enough to interrupt the Disruptive Annual Showcase of Bookfestival Alchemy (turning remainders into beer).

Personally, my LSI sales took a hit over Christmas (I suspect that was university bookstores being agressive with returns), and then really got smacked in Feb.  You’d've expected the hit to come in June, when the Booksurge titles came racing out, but… not so much.  Anyway, I’ve doubled my list and just tried to stay flat with print across three channels (with Europe still pending).  Given reduced cost structure and that economy, that’s a major victory, and I’ve more than achieved it (with Europe still pending and Replica #s unknown).

For LSI, though, I think something else happened first week of Feb., ’bout the time John Ingram sent the rather strange email telling us all that “Print on Demand Is The Future.”  Whenever bad stuff happens with LSI, they take a Yin-Yang approach, not mentioning the problem, and issuing some sort of press release about whatever new and good thing they’re doing, like, say, when Booksurge comes live in Germany, LSI announces “we printed 7 million books in UK!”

So, my theory is something really major happened in Feb. to Ingram/LSI.  Given the odd release from a member of the Ingram family, something nuclear, like, either Borders or Barnes & Noble isn’t taking LSI books anymore; and will now be dumping their existing stock of titles.  Based on the size of the hit to everybody, I’d guess probably the latter company is the one giving us all a goodbye (Borders has been sucking for a while now).

I will go out on a limb and say, unless you’re one of the 40-odd LSI houses repackaging PG titles that are now going for $0-1 in the Kindle Store, it isn’t Amazon that’s the problem. (Amazon is still tied down a bit by that lawsuit, from the settlement-mad class-action firm, and, IMHO, will not be doing anything to promote Booksurge while the discovery period is ongoing.)

If my theory’s right, and you’re a small publisher, the numbers you’re seeing today from LSI are not only accurate for today but predictive of what you’re likely to see going forward.

There are a few things you can do, immediately, to help your bottom line:

1. Take your book .pdf, give it a new ISBN and, immediately, set it up as an ebook in LSI’s digital store.  Do that tonight.  IngramDigital is promising.  This can help you, particularly for reference works.  Charge more than $1.
2. Give the Kindle Store a try, or Mobipocket.  Fictionwise as well, but really Kindle/Mobi.
3. Seriously consider, if you haven’t already, putting your book into CreateSpace as well as LSI.  Particularly if you’re doing standard discounts, you’ll probably really like the results, and you’ll be paid for it next month.
4. … use your website to promote and retail your books… for some reason, people say MySpace works great for this, Facebook not so much, twitter meh.
5. … sell ebook versions direct…
6. Other channels for ebooks exist, it’s up to you to determine if they’re worth your time. You might want  to stagger the introduction of formats a bit and take advantage of such publicity as exists. Understand in the ebook universe nobody sells anything close to Amazon.
7. Remember, you have four months until those sales show up on your bottom line.  Plan ahead, take advantage of things that will compensate you on a faster schedule.

Best of luck.

Tags: Amazon, Books, Booksurge, CreateSpace, Kindle Store, LSI, POD, Replica

This entry was posted on Friday, April 3rd, 2009 at 2:45 pm and is filed under Devices, Ebooks, FAQ, Odd. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.