Selling ebooks on Google Play

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“At Google Books, it’s like being blindfolded, drugged and beaten, then dropped from a helicopter into a foreign country and being tasked with completing a treasure hunt of items that are illegibly scrawled on a wet piece of paper, torn into several pieces.”

We had to share this comment from a group on Goodreads about getting ebooks distributed on Google Play. It would be amusing if were not so true. 

Wow! What an incredibly bad and unintuitive product by Google! We truly are amazed. You need a degree in astrophysics just to work your way round this system. 

On top of it all, the contact us button is not working, of which I am told they are aware (how difficult can it be to fix a ‘contact us’ button with all the clever geeks at Google?)

Here are three links which talk about getting a book distributed on Google Play:

It really is as if there is nobody managing this and that Google does not care about it even though it’s a huge potential revenue stream for the company and even though publishers are always looking to diversify their distribution.

What we don’t understand is how someone at Google allowed this product to be launched in its current form.

Google, if you are reading this,

1. Do visit the links above and pay attention to people’s concerns. Everything you need to know is there. 

2. Contact us and we’d be delighted to come and go through the customer journey with you. You can do much better than this. We know you can. 

‘Afghanistan Revealed’ on Barnes&Noble Nook best-seller list

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We are delighted to announce that our book, Afghanistan Revealed, is on the Barnes&Noble (BN.com) History NOOK Books best-seller list. 

Explorer, Consul, Soldier, Spy - new title from Crux Publishing

We are delighted to have published the incredible story of Sir Percy Sykes’ adventures in Persia as an ebook. 

Kobo search results still a mess (part 2)

Love it. Type in London and the first book you get is on New York and all the books are by the same author! Houston, I think we have a problem!

Kobo search results still a mess!

When, oh when, will Kobo get this right? 

Below are three titles that Kobo spat out as results 17, 18 & 19 of over 76,000 results when we entered ‘A Short History of the World’ into their search engine.

How complicated can it be to have an effective search system in an online book store? More importantly, how much business are they losing and how many potential sales are authors losing as a result?

Come on Kobo, you can do this! 

Let’s review ebooks damn it!

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We have been promoting ebooks for some time now but we are always faced with the same problem - the mainstream press are not interested in reviewing ebooks, which they consider very much inferior to the printed variety.

Of course there are several good reasons for this, not least that there are more than enough excellent paperbacks and hardbacks released each year; with such an abundant choice, I guess reviewers think there is not much of a need to review books that are published in ebook-only format.

But things are changing. Not every book is published in print and there’s a growing market of people who not only want to read ebooks, but also want to discover new authors who might not have a big publisher to promote them. Why not cater to it?

Yes, of course many books are published both in paper and digitally, but many aren’t. Yes, of course many bloggers review ebooks, but equally many of these blogs are hard to find. There are lots of excuses for not doing it, and there probably will be for a while, but the digital revolution is upon us, whether the reviewers like it or not.

As Gandhi said: ‘First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.’

The campaign to get the press to review ebooks starts here. Don’t be last!

The future of ebook prices

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There was alot of discussion recently about Sony’s 20 pence ebook promotions. Amazon price matched, which they have every right to do according to their agreement with publishers, and The Life of Pie is still available as a Kindle ebook for 20p. If you have not bought it, you should. It’s a great book, and a bargain. At 20p, you have virtually nothing to lose by buying the book and very much to gain.

Of course, this is only one of the many pricing strategies available to publishers and authors. It’s even possible to offer your book free of charge, the benefits being that this can result in tens of thousands of people downloading your book (though only with a significant marketing push to tell the world you are offering your book for free or nobody will know about it). Why would you want that? Well, at least a percentage of these people go on to read the book, review it and, if it’s any good, tell their friends to buy it. It gets the ball rolling so to speak.

Anyway, the purpose of this blog post is not to discuss pricing strategies, but to discuss the future of ebook prices. 

We believe that customers are only prepared to pay paperback prices for plain text ebooks because the whole thing is new, because it’s still exciting to download a new book onto your reading device which you may have recently received for Christmas, and because in some instances they have no other choice. At some point people are going to baulk at the price and the market price of a plain text ebook will see an inexorable decline, hovering out (when exactly is anybody’s guess), we guess, at around £3.99 or $5.00 in the US. The problem of course with this price is that those publishers stuck in the old school model and scared by lower prices, will do more and more to keep their titles in paperback for as long as possible. This means that digital readers will have to wait longer before some titles are available electronically. Or something like that…

Eventually (and I won’t define eventually), it’s very possible that most books will be read on e-reading devices and that the profits achieved on selling ebooks, even at a lower price, will be superior to those achieved from selling paperbacks due to the quantity sold.  

In the mean time, new technologies are regularly being introduced and it’s likely that a format will come out for which readers will be happy to pay a little extra. For example iBooks Author already allows you to embed video and almost limitless color photos (unlike the Kindle which is still very much text driven, despite the introduction of the Kindle Fire). This gives you a totally different reading experience. We tested it on one of our books, Afghanistan Revealed, and were pretty happy with the result. 

So, what is the future of ebook prices? We believe plain text ebooks will gradually drop in price as supply and competition increases and more people have the ability to read them, and more ‘dynamic’ ebooks, which will change the way we read books forever, will be sold at a premium. 

Kobo: still lightyears behind the competition

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We have been publishing ebooks on digital platforms for well over a year now so we’ve seen a few changes in this world as you can imagine. Amazon lead the field with a quick and painless upload process - one can generally have a book selling within 48 hours of upload. What Amazon lose on curation, they gain with the sheer efficiency of their service. Well done Amazon. That’s why you continue to lead!

It takes a little longer to upload books onto the Apple iBookstore generally depending on which format they are created with. There seems to be a backlog of books being uploaded with iBooks Author which can take up to a month to be approved. What Apple loses on speed however, they gain on quality through their curated approach. A curated approach means that they review all titles that go onto their store. This, in turn, means that they get rid of much of the dross which Amazon have to take on by being open to everybody (though there are rumours that Amazon might change their strategy on this). Well done Apple. Shopping on the iBookstore is clean and easy!

BN.com still have a pretty manual upload procedure that they would do well to improve upon and is surprising based on how much market share they have in the US. One has to upload files and an excel metadata sheet via an FTP server and then send them an email to let them know that you have done this. Their team must get flooded with emails and we all know that the greater the number of manual tasks, the greater chance of error. Unlike with Amazon, there is no defined period for how long it takes to get a book up on their website, though generally the team are pretty responsive to emails and a pleasure to work with. We do hope that they will introduce a web-based uploading system in the near future. 

Lagging far behind on virtually every comparable is Kobo which still has significant amounts of work to do to catch up. They have improved their manual uploading procedure a while ago, introducing Kobo Writing Life whose interface is pretty clean but at the most recent upload, we were unable to specify that we wanted our books sold in a particular country, even though we ticked the box. We specified a price for a title in the UK and are getting another price on their website. For months they were even unable to let us specify a price ending in .99 though they seem to have found a way to do this now. 

Second, while Amazon and Apple give almost instantaneous sales reports through an excellent web interface, Kobo sends reports in an excel file via email on a monthly basis on the 20th of the month after the sales took place. This is frustrating when you want to see how one’s marketing is affecting book sales and be reactive. Marketing makes or breaks ebook sales and to have no access to instantaneous sales data is a major hurdle to effective review of marketing spend. A few months back they even made an error with their exchange rates (in our favor) which I had to point out to them. 

Third, our sales on Kobo are not even a fraction of the sales we make on the sales channels above. This may be partly to do with their search functionality. We typed ‘short world history’ into the search engine, we got the results below. Try it.

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It would be funny were it not clearly affecting our sales. But surely Kobo is missing out on sales if the only way to look for a book is to write the exact book title? What about people who are browsing? We were told in June 2012 that this was because their development team were doing some work on the website which was resulting in some strange results showing up on search, but nine months later they have not managed to solve the problem. It’s a pretty important error for a business focused on selling ebooks! 

We have to say, their customer service guys are always very helpful but they are working with systems which seem lightyears behind their competition and these support staff must be equally frustrated with the system. When we met their representatives at the London Book Fair last year, we enthused about how their investment by Rakuten, a very big internet player in Japan, would no doubt revolutionise their service. Their response ‘No, Rakuten are pretty happy. They are not planning any major changes.’

Hmm. Perhaps it’s time they did.

The Pope has written an ebook!

That’s right, Pope Francis I has written a book, On Heaven and Earth which is currently only available in ebook format. 

I guess that’s good PR for the ebook world, although you would have thought that his publishers would have printed a few of the paperback edition just in case.

The only caveat is that it’s in Spanish. I wonder what the English-language rights are worth these days!

A very cool cover for your Kindle!

This is the first blog post in which we are going to plug a product. 

Before we do so we want to let you know that we have absolutely no affiliation with the company and have never spoken to them, though we fully intend to!

Saying that, the product is so cool that we had to blog about it.

The company is called KleverCase. They make beautiful covers for Kindles that look like old books. The covers are made in the UK and they ship worldwide.

Now you can read 50 Shades (we know, very 2012) and make people think you are reading Einstein’s Theory of Relativity or Short History of Art. Not bad!

OK, it’s a bit of a luxury but at £20 it’s a snip and makes a great present for any Kindle lover. 

Well done KleverCase.

By the way, if you have not seen this Saturday Night Live spoof ad, about the Kindle you should.