Red Planet Audiobooks Company Blog
“We read you, loud and clear!”

The Audio Publishers Association recently released the data collected in their annual sales survey. You can peruse the press release right here. If you’re thinking about turning your title into an audiobook, this information can give you an idea of where the industry as a whole is at the moment.

However, I would urge you to take this data with a bog ol’ grain of salt. Keep in mind that these numbers come primarily from the big audiobook production companies, and as we’ve preached before, they’re not always exactly ahead of the curve. In fact, if your title doesn’t fit the standard audiobook profile, you might actually be in a BETTER position to generate sales, because you’re competing with fewer products in your genre.

Back to the numbers, though. The biggest (and least surprising) trend is the gradual, unstoppable march from physical products to digital downloads. Last year, downloads made up 21% of sales. This time around, they make up 29%. This is great news for small presses and independent authors because digital downloads are incredibly easy and inexpensive to distribute when compared to physical CDs. When you publish an audiobook with someone like (ahem) yours truly, your return on each sale can, literally, jump from a couple of bucks to twelve or fifteen dollars.

Interestingly, books marketed to adults continue to dominate the big players’ production pipelines. Children’s and YA titles make up a paltry 13% of sales, down from 17%. I think this is a situation ripe for the picking by smaller presses when you think about that shift toward digital distribution. There’s a giant hole in the marketplace. Consider the kids and young adults that you know. How many of them DON’T have an iPod, iPhone, or other MP3-enabled device in their pocket? You won’t find many who aren’t toting one around. And do you know what they’re listening to? Music, obviously, right? But dig a little deeper. Ask them about podcasts. I think you’ll be surprised at how many millennials will tell you about their favorites. And what are the vast majority of podcasts? Spoken-word entertainment, that’s what. Sort of like… audiobooks!

You see, I think that publishing professionals are often asking the wrong questions. They produce audiobooks for older demographics because older demographics buy audiobooks. And older demographics buy audiobooks because audiobook producers release titles aimed at… older demographics! And the world goes round and round and round. And in the meantime, opportunities abound for those who are willing to rephrase the conversation.

This isn’t the only less-than-obvious takeaway from the data. Check it out. If you’re self-published, think about your title. If you’re involved in a small press, think about your catalog. Is it underserved in the audiobook marketplace? Who’s your audience? Do they use technology in ways that are a natural fit for audio? How is the traditional industry responding? Find a problem and solve it!

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Illustration credit: kevinzhengli

We recently returned from the biggest publishing conference in the US, Book Expo America. It was in New York City, it provided a great opportunity to meet and mingle with established and up-and-coming publishers, authors, and technologists, and we had the chance to get some perspective on where our industry is headed.

We also spread the word about the new, lower barriers to entry for self published audio books. I presented a session at the conference called “Audiobooks for the Rest of Us,” and served on a panel with some great self- and small-publishing professionals. Throughout the week, 3 key points came up over and over, and I’d like to share these insights with you.

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Last month, Tinkers, by Paul Harding, won the Pulitzer Prize. It’s a great read, beautifully written, contemplative. And it was rejected by every major publishing company in America. I’m going to repeat that so it can sink in. Every single major publishing house in America told the eventual 2010 Pulitzer Prize winner, “Nope, don’t think so.”

You can read an account of the book’s eventual success here.

Eventually, Mr. Harding sent the manuscript to the tiny Bellevue Literary Press, a small publisher associated with the NYU Medical School. They bought it, the book picked up steam among independent bookstores, and the rest is, as they say, history.

So what? Well, aside from providing a few laughs as the New York Times struggles to explain why they didn’t review the book (uhhh… we reviewed the runners-up!), I think this provides a couple of lessons for those who would eschew the establishment and go with independent publishing or a small house.

First, it proves that it can be done. Is your neighbor’s expose on the alien lizard-men posing as local city council members going to win the Pulitzer Prize? Probably not, but it does show that you don’t have to have Random House behind you in order to find an audience. Small presses and independent authors with passion, drive, and, yes, a little bit of luck, can have great success. And when that success is on your terms, when you are in the driver’s seat, the result can be a much more satisfying experience than if a faceless corporation is in charge.

In addition, it proves that wherever and however your first successful publishing experience comes from, success breeds success. Remember those major publishers who rejected Paul Harding the first time around? Well, within an hour of the Pulitzer announcement, Random House announced a 2 book deal with him, and he landed a Guggenheim fellowship a few days later.

And lastly, I think it’s yet another example of the changing nature of publishing. I know we harp on that here a lot, but really. The thunder lizard era of big publishing is coming to a close. Would you rather be a T-Rex? Or a mammal?

If you’re an author or small press publisher, you really owe it to yourself to think long and hard about the Google Book Settlement. I mean, REALLY think about it, and what it can mean for you and your content. In my opinion, one of the best articles about the implications and predictions about The Settlement (yeah, you have to capitalize like that, it really is That Important!) can be found RIGHT HERE. It’s a lot to wrap your head around, but go read it. I’ll wait.

Got it? Good!

Now let’s talk about what all this means to YOU, the independent author, the micro-press, the small imprint. The article goes into some theorizing a bit about pulp science fiction, but I think it bears some more examination. And since the article used those big ol’ numbered bullet points, I will too!

1. THE WORLD IS CHANGING
If you are at all in tune with the state of publishing, you know this to be true. We hammer this point home over and over in our business model, our advice, and our approach to everything we do, but it’s just because its That. Damn. Important. The state of publishing was pretty much static for about 100 years. A century! Publishers consolidated. Middlemen flourished. The people who actually CREATED increasingly got the short end of the stick. But that ship has sailed. The digital revolution that has struck down music conglomerates (did you catch that EMI is on the verge of bankruptcy?) and, to a lesser extent, is blowing apart the film business, has spread to publishing. Distribution used to be the big sticking point when it came to books. It took lots of resources and deep pockets to get paper and cloth around the world. Not anymore. Amazon. Google. Apple. Audible. Lightning Source.

2. THERE IS OPPORTUNITY IN CHANGE
As the publishing industry bangs on the big red PANIC button over and over, the time has come to seize your destiny. That might seem a little overblown, but really. Change is unsettling. It’s scary. When we see a new way of doing things, our first instinct is to mistrust it. The GBS is a big, honking tower of change being erected in the middle of everything. And it’s not the only one. Look at Apple over there, building the iPad. Look at everybody else, scrambling to build their own tablets. Is that a Kindle? A JooJoo? It’s easy to get overwhelmed. Don’t. Just remember this…

When you look at all of these things, you should think 3 words: New Distribution Opportunities. In 1975, there was precisely ONE way to get your words into the hands of thousands of readers: Big Publishing. Now, there are hundreds of competing ways to do so. Leverage them!

3. BIG PUBLISHING WILL LIE TO YOU
As half of the industry hits the panic button, the other half will yell at everybody who’ll listen, and they’ll have one message: THIS WON’T WORK! Understand, this is a bunker mentality. The status quo is crumbling around them, and once you’ve built a reality, it’s natural to deny that change is happening. Many in the industry are completely focused on doing things “the way we always have.” They’re going to deny that change is afoot until it’s too late. Here, WATCH THIS. Kind of like that, except that no matter how many times that happens, big publishing is ONLY interested in how many times the team in white passes the ball, and will DENY that anything else is going on. So expect to read a lot of articles by and have a lot of conversations with “insiders” who will list a million reasons that the old system is the only “legitimate” way to go. They’ll pooh-pooh independent publishing, small publishing, new distribution. They’ll talk about how The Settlement is the end of publishing. They’ll long for the bygone days of massive consolidation, and they’ll tell you that, one way or another, that’s the best way to do things. Ignore them. They’re wrong.

4. REVOLUTION IS HARD
Nobody said this was going to be easy. If there’s something I tell our clients over and over, it’s this: You must be an evangelist for your work. With the changing landscape of publishing, that fact is more important than ever. When power shifts to the hands of the people, it’s easy for your voice to get drowned out in the crowd. The GBS is going to make untold thousands of titles easily and immediately available. How do you find an audience in that sort of market?

There is precisely one way. You have to seek out those who are receptive to your message. There has to be a fire in your heart that wants to get that message out! Be authentic, be focused, be bold. There’s NOTHING wrong with “selling” your ideas. It’s not dirty, it’s necessary! If you want your message to find your reader, if you want your beautiful words to lodge in the hearts and minds of the maximum number of people, if you want to touch them, to affect them, it’s up to YOU to find THEM, not the other way around! Exploit new media, throw yourself into the fray. Be a revolutionary.

Ready to roll up your sleeves?

The New York Times has published a great article about Apple’s iPhone App Store and the possibilities and difficulties faced by small developers. You can read it here.

If you’re an author who is self-publishing a print or audiobook, you should peruse it. At first blush, it might not seem to have a lot of relevance to your situation. After all, a software developer’s job is a lot different from an author’s. However, when you begin to compare the emerging publishing business and distribution models to the Apple App Store model, there are a whole lot of parallels.

• In the App Store, the playing field is leveled. Electronic Arts and the guy down the street have an equal shot at success. In the same way, print-on-demand, affordable audiobook production and distribution, and online sales are giving small publishers and self published authors access to huge segments of the population.
• If the “little guy” enjoys success in the App Store, he’s going to keep the lion’s share of the profits and control over his own destiny. Likewise, if your self-published book gains traction, you’re much more in the driver’s seat than you would be with a huge publishing conglomerate.
• With easy, egalitarian access to the consumer, the challenge for the App Store developer (and the micro-publisher or independent author) becomes a “background noise” problem. How do you stand out? How do you make yourself heard? This subject can be debated at length, and I hope some readers will comment with their thoughts, but the obvious first step is to create a great product! Write a book that you’re passionate about. Become an evangelist for it. Be a zealot! Does this guarantee success? No, of course not. But another one of the advantages to the new business model is…
• The “cost of entry” barriers, both in the App Store in the publishing world, have been demolished. You don’t have to be rich to get into the game. And likewise, you don’t have to sell a million copies to be very, very successful.

In any case, if you’re a self-published author or a small press, you owe it to yourself to keep thinking about how changing technologies and new business models affect your opportunities, your marketing, and your success.

Write on!

As you might imaging, we listen to a lot of audiobooks here at Red Planet. These include ours, of course, but we also listen to audiobooks produced by other companies. We believe in the product!

We’re also big proponents of technology. We believe the shift to digital distribution, web-based sales models, and on-line word of mouth are a given. It’s up to us to figure out how to thrive using these new tools.

So the other day, I was pleasantly surprised to find a promotion by a very large on-line bookstore who will remain nameless. They were offering several audiobook short stories in .mp3 format for free. I was out of town at the time and I had a long drive ahead of me. I had a few minutes before I was scheduled to leave.

“Great!” I thought. “I’ll just download these, toss them onto my iPhone, and be on my way!”

Oh, if only it were that simple.

First, I had to sign up for a free account to even download the files. Then, I had to go through an entire checkout process. For free FILES. Then, the icing on the cake. I couldn’t just download regular, plain-Jane, vanilla mp3s. Oh, no. I had to download a proprietary downloader doohickey that would THEN allow me to download the .mp3s. That were “protected” with DRM.

DRM. “Digital Rights Management.” The scourge of the audio consumer. DRM is encryption of one type or other that content-providers put on their files to help combat piracy. Only, there’s a problem. Well, more than one problem, actually.

First of all, it doesn’t work. At all. Nobody who really, really wants to share a file on a Bittorrent site has ever been deterred by DRM. Any DRM-protected product on the face of the planet is available on-line at a Torrent site within a couple of clicks.

Secondly, it annoys, frustrates, and confounds the consumer. I’m pretty technologically savvy (my official title is “Futurist,” after all!) and it took me a good 10 minutes to even figure out how this major corporation’s software worked. As the clock ticked, I struggled mightily with downloading my “free” (and increasingly annoying) audiobooks. By the time I figured it out, I was out of time. Frustrated, I closed my laptop and went on my way. Without my free audiobooks.

There’s a lesson here, publishers, music companies, and entertainment providers. If you make your legitimate product more confusing, difficult, and hard to consume than the pirated equivalent, guess where your consumers are going to acquire that product? It doesn’t take a genius to figure this one out.

At Red Planet, we’re not opposed to the idea of DRM. We think content-providers should be paid fairly for content. We believe in copyright. But until there’s a seamless, universal, easy way to use DRM, we’ll be selling all of our content in plain .mp3 format, thank you very much.

You don’t gain more customers by insulting and confusing them.

Amazon is beginning to ship the second generation Kindle this week. The Kindle, if you’ve been living under a rock for the last year, is an electronic book reader that features wireless connectivity. Jim Goldman at CNBC has a rundown of some of the numbers for the device, and they’re fantastic.

Originally, experts expected Amazon to sell about 180,000 Kindles in 2008. Now they estimate that 500,000 units were actually sold, and that number could have been closer to 750,000 had Amazon not experienced a complete sell-out near the end of the year.

For comparison, the Kindle is selling at a clip that outpaces the early iPod by about 30%.

Those numbers should really give anyone interested in technology and books real pause. We’ve heard for years that publishing isn’t doing well, but the success of the Kindle suggests that, given the right circumstances, it sure can be!

Big kudos to Amazon to finally put together a device that combines the elements that consumers are looking for in a portable electronic book reader. It’s a vindication for people like us who just don’t believe the critics when they say publishing has no future. The readers are still out there, it’s just up to us to reach them in new, forward-thinking ways.

There’s a great article at Slate.com right now about newspapers and the Internet. You can read it here. It’s all about how newspaper companies, contrary to what you might think, have often been early adopters when it comes to technology. As the article says, “The industry has understood from the advent of AM radio in the 1920s that technology would eventually be its undoing, and has always behaved accordingly.”

Newspaper companies have often, as a result of their fear of new technologies supplanting their business model, experimented with those technologies early in an attempt to leverage them to their advantage. They were among the first on the scene when AM radio appeared, bought early TV licences at a breakneck rate, and jumped on the world wide web early on.

So… what gives? Why do people often associate newspapers with a “dead” business model? Why is the industry hemorrhaging money and readers? Well, it seems that often, the only reason newspapers have pursued new technology was out of a sense of fear. Fear of getting left behind. Fear of being supplanted. Fear of standing at the station as the train pulled away.

As a result, the technological forays made by newspaper companies have been oddly stilted and often come across as insincere, overly corporate, and out of touch right out of the gate. From the article again:

Newspapers deserve bragging rights for having homesteaded the Web long before most government agencies and major corporations knew what a URL was. Given the industry’s early tenancy, deep pockets, and history of paranoid experimentation with new communication forms, one would expect to find plenty in the way of innovations and spin-offs.

But that’s not the case, and I think I know why: From the beginning, newspapers sought to invent the Web in their own image by repurposing the copy, values, and temperament found in their ink-and-paper editions. Despite being early arrivals, despite having spent millions on manpower and hardware, despite all the animations, links, videos, databases, and other software tricks found on their sites, every newspaper Web site is instantly identifiable as a newspaper Web site. By succeeding, they failed to invent the Web.

So, as we here at Red Planet Audiobooks look to the future, we need to be careful. The audio book and print publishing industries often operate a lot like the newspaper industry. One of the tenets of Red Planet’s philosophy is early adoption and celebration of technology; using that technology to give our self published authors and small presses every advantage we can. But we need to be sure that we don’t lose sight of the forest for the sake of the trees. We need to be sure that we continue to adopt and celebrate those technological advances to put new tools in the hands of our authors and not simply as a blind and panicked reaction to fears of being left behind.

As the chief Futurist at Red Planet, I pledge to keep those things in mind. If you ever see us start to get off track in this area, if you ever sense that we’re starting to act like the players in the newspaper industry, drop me a line and let me know, won’t you? If you do, I promise I’ll read you, loud and clear.

The “death” of publishing has been predicted for years, of course, but Lawrence Osborne at Forbes.com has an interesting article about why he feels publishing is currently in trouble. In it, he makes a point that we here at Red Planet have tried to drive home for a while. Namely, that over the last decade or two, the major publishing houses have moved to a “blockbuster” business model that mimics Hollywood.

What do I mean by that? Well, rather than paying a reasonable rate for quality writing that they then carefully market, the big houses now buy up everything but the kitchen sink. They pay most writers peanuts and do next to no marketing on the off-chance that one or two properties will “hit it big,” banking on a few hits to cover the cost of everything. A few “marqee” writers, on the other hand, get paid vast sums of money, and the company’s whole marketing budget goes into propping up the latest dumbed-down thriller.

Unsurprisingly, this model isn’t working well. You can read Osborne’s piece for more information, but suffice to say that here at Red Planet, we continue to champion a new model, one in which the author has a greater stake in, more control over, and more to gain than in the “Hollywood” model.

And the revolution continues.

The New York Times has an interesting article about the recent agreement that Google reached with traditional publishers to offer e-book versions of out-of-print copyrighted works. It touches on a few of the themes that are near and dear to our hearts here at Red Planet. Namely: change is good.

From the article:

Eileen Gittins, chief executive of Blurb, a Silicon Valley company that helps people publish their own books, using the Internet. “The book publishing business has had a front-row seat to see what happened to the music industry.”

It’s interesting to note that even with that “front row seat,” most major publishers have chosen to fight any change to their business model tooth and nail. In fact, this recent agreement with Google has only come about after a court fight with the search giant.

It remains to be seen whether some of the dinosaur publishers will change their ways, or whether they’ll simply be swept away as micro-publishing, self publishing, and the long-tail business model championed by many new players in the internet age rises even more to fore.

We shall see. But times, they are definitely a-changin’.