Eight years ago. EIGHT. 8!!!

I wrote this: The Perfect Bookstore.

Six years ago, I wrote the followup: The Perfect Bookstore

Today, my good friend Nate Hoffelder, digital maven and my occasional partner in crime, pointed me to this:

Paris’s first on-demand-only bookshop.

Point-by-point similarities:

1. The concept itself
2. The coffee shop
3. Its location near a college

Best part?

Meriot said he needs to sell about 15 books daily to break even.

That’s a margin even I didn’t foresee.
 

Go read this and all the comments, then come back. Now we’ll recap.

Footprint: A narrow storefront on the county square of a small midwestern city, with three floors. (I didn’t bother with the third floor sketch. Use your imagination.)

Complaint: It’s not a “real” bookstore.

Disclaimers: 1) I’m not an industrial designer so don’t ding me on scale, lack of bathrooms, and walking space, etc etc etc. 2) This is an IDEA. Don’t take me to task as if I’m on the cusp of taking over the world and implementing all these in a grand sweep tonight while you sleep.

Goal: To make the bookstore a destination, not a stop on your to-do list.

I. Print on Demand

This is the key to blending the Espresso and “real” books:

1. Do you know what it is? It’s a catalog holder, like the ones at auto parts stores, where you stand at the counter and find which part you need for your car. Only these won’t have catalogs. They’ll have cover flats, separated by genre, subdivided by subgenre.
2. You will sit at the counter and flip through them. You will have a little wifi gizmo tied to the store’s computers. You will enter your account number and you will order what you want by pointing the gizmo at the bar code. Your order will go downstairs to the Espresso machines.
3. If you want an electronic version, it can be wifi’d do your device and/or you can have a CD/DVD burned, and/or you can have a download link emailed to you.
4. If you have already ordered what you want from a home computer or smartphone or other device, it will be waiting for you at the customer service counter (“Espresso Order Counter”).
5. The store will have a website that functions like any other ebook third-party retailer.

II. eReading

You may purchase the most current electronic reading devices and be advised by someone who actually knows what they are, how they work, and can teach you. There will be workshops.

III. “Real” books

1. The store will have at least one copy of whatever the buyer knows his customers like. He won’t have to order more because he’ll “Espresso it.” That way, customers can browse actual books.
2. The third floor will be dedicated to art books, children’s books, collector’s editions, with plenty of comfortable chairs. Yes. You will have to climb stairs. Get over it.

IV. Sustenance

In the basement there will be a coffee/tea bar with pastries and chocolate, possibly a small deli. There will be ample room to hang out.

V. Extras

1. You can watch the Espresso machines through the glass window.
2. There will be book club nights.
3. The Espresso books will always be brought upstairs so you don’t have to go downstairs if you don’t want to.

There you go. Blast away.

Congratulations. I think that’s brilliant.

However, you have negated that brilliance by the simple fact that you have obviously not gone about researching the industry any more than anybody you hope to make a customer.

What I do not think is brilliant is the following:

1. Partnering with AuthorSolutions, Inc.

Consider:

• Do you know that they use Lightning Source to print their books? Do you know you could get your own account with Lightning Source and do the same thing, only cheaper for you?
• Do you know you could’ve set up your own in-house programs and packages? You should’ve; you have the resources right at your fingertips.
• Do you know that the rates you’re quoting are outrageous if one went piecemeal to freelancers for those services? And if you do (which I don’t think you do), you would’ve gotten a bigger cut of it had you not partnered with AuthorSolutions Inc. You already have editors and artists and such. Use them. Hire a couple more if you don’t have enough.
• Do you know that AuthorSolutions Inc. doesn’t have the best reputation on the planet even amongst subsidy publishers?
• Do you realize that the 50% “royalty” you take from your customers could have been at a much higher dollar amount if you had set up your own shop?

Bad, bad business decision, just from a P&L standpoint. Geez, you’re cutting off your margins to spite your bottom line.

2. Attaching your brand.

I shouldn’t even have to explain this.

UPDATE: As of 11/19/2009 4:12 PM, Harlequin has decided to rename its vanity press division something other than Harlequin whatever. Pub Rants got the scoop.

3. Thinking/branding it as self-publishing.

Self-publishing involves setting up shop as a business and outsourcing the tasks you can’t do yourself. What you’re doing is a service company promoting way overpriced service packages.

4. Your website really does kinda suck.

Oh, sure. You’ll get a lot of customers, and that’s okay. I see nothing wrong with it. I just think you coulda gone about it a different way.

And this is what surprises me. Harlequin, you’re brilliant. You’ve made nothing but all the right steps in all these decades of publishing. You flourish where others founder. You took a great (welcome) leap with Carina, but this? This displays the business sense of a kindergartner.

It makes me think your parent company is setting all this up and making you (and by extension, Malle Vallik) take the fall.

I’ve been to very few of the pingbacks, but of the ones I have, quite a few of them described the post as cheeky.¹ I like that. I like that they recognized that instead of presenting it like I was completely serious and the plan/design was complete. I have lots of ideas about a whole lot of things. Most of them are half-assed.

It’s been clear for months that it will be a not-so-merry holiday season for publishers, but at least one house has gone so far as to halt acquisitions. PW has learned that Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has asked its editors to stop buying books. […] Another agent who had also heard about the no-acquisitions policy at HMH called the move “very scary” and said it’s indicative of an industry climate worse than any he’s ever seen.

Predictions:

1. Expect this to keep happening for a while at other major publishers.
2. More independent publishers will spring up, particularly in the ebook arena.
3. Major publishers will start mining their backlists for ebooks. Oh, wait, they already have. Credit for innovation coming right up!
4. Revisions in the advance/royalty system. E-presses blazed this trail, but Harper Studios has taken up the cause (and may end up reaping the credit for that, too).
5. This may be the death knell for the consignment system of selling books. One can hope, anyway.

Yeah, it’s depressing, but A) everybody’s having a hard time, so boo hoo at you too, publishing and B) everything is cyclical.

Quite frankly, the economic downturn and the rise of the ebook couldn’t be timed better. You build up the low-cost or free alternative in the downswing (coupled with instant gratification), something people can afford and are open to, then you see it explode once the upswing begins.

Dead tree books will NOT be a thing of the past (knock on wood), but the smart publishers and booksellers will find cheaper alternatives to bring those to market too. If you want to survive after an economic downturn, you must start thinking in the long-term instead of the short-term; you sure as heck aren’t making any money now, so figure out how to make money when everybody has some again.

Pssst, publishers and booksellers:

It’s called the Espresso.

In kiosks.

At Wal-Mart, Target, and smack DAB in the middle of your chain or independent bookstore.

1. The election
2. Prop 8 in California
3. “Black October” in publishing
4. Independent publishing
5. Agents and editors (the “Gatekeepers”)
6. Mormon writers/Mormon literature

But a couple of posts on Nathan Bransford’s blog yesterday sorted at least one issue out for me, which is my firm belief that whether or not independent publishing becomes as accepted independent filmmaking and independent music making, it was the right choice for me. And I’m going to come back to that Espresso Book Machine thing because it’s tres important.

Which leads me to a post Mike Cane made recently about self-pubbing and an author’s inability to do it all, yet tries because he wants to save money. He’s right overall, but I learned long ago that creative types in one discipline are drawn to other disciplines and have the ability to do those well, too. What they are, though … that I can’t say. So that’s going to be my jumping off point for today’s Jack Handey.

BOOKEEN CYBOOK. I briefly mentioned this in the ePub post, but forgot to say that this is one that’s caught my attention more than a few times. It’s just that it gets overshadowed by the Biggies and I forget about it. eInk (therefore, no backlight–but you knew that), supports PDFs (don’t know about reflow), plays mp3s. Also supports Mobipocket, HTML, TXT, and PalmDoc. It runs $379, which is a bit rich for my blood.

BEBOOK. There’s a new little kid in town. According to MobileRead forums, this puppy’s got 30k machines in circulation (which I have no idea what that really means). At $349, you can add it to the eInk contenders.

BOOKS ON BOARD and DIESEL EBOOKS. I know I talk about Fictionwise a lot, but more and more I find myself going to booksonboard.com and diesel-ebooks.com just because their formats are easier to follow and I can find stuff more easily. Fictionwise is a nightmare for my poor ADD. So, hey, Fictionwise. Do something about your web design, because you’re about to lose a customer.

Coming to an Australian bookstore near you. Am I the only one who can visualize this beast in the middle of Wal-Mart and Target, Sams Club and Costco? I mean, this isn’t new news; the concept has been around for a while, but the machines are expensive.

Still, I’d think Barnes & Noble and Borders would find this to be worthy of early adoption, if only to reduce their stores’ square footage and associated costs. Why are you still sitting in that small box? Your cheese moved.

[Okay, okay, to be fair, PersonaNonData reports that they’re steadily rolling out in the US.]

As ebookie as I am, I’m excited about this thing Time called an “ATM for books.” Paper is still my first love, to stroke and fondle, to smell and behold. Uhm, paper prØn?

STANZA. I’ve been hearing a lot lately about this ebook reading software which runs (built expressly for? I don’t know) the ePub format. After preliminary perusal, we at B10 find this pertinent to us in that it offers ways to convert text to the ePub format and an iPhone/iTouch app to read ebooks on those devices. According to the website, it is also:

… the first program that has a built-in export feature especially for the Amazon Kindle. Your PDFs, Word documents, and other eBooks can all be exported to the Kindle’s native format and copied over to the device using a USB cable.

However, before we get our hopes up, Apple may blackball Stanza the way it’s blackballed Podcaster. Still, Stanza 1.4 (newest version) is now up in the iApps store.

So along with Stanza, the current state of publishing, the slow (in my opinion) early adoption of the Espresso by outlets such as Barnes & Noble and Borders, please simply add in the requisite anti-DRM rant–

Just how long until commercial publishers start using Stanza to sell and distribute their wares as nonDRMed ePub? And how will the terms compare to those of Amazon and others? (From the Teleread article linked above.)

This is where you start wondering where the Greedy Bastards went. Ban? Ignore? Flee? No! Embrace! Embracement = mo’ money. Where’s Gordon Gekko when you need him?

I’d like to see new and different in romance. It took Ellora’s Cave and Loose Id and Samhain to break you out into genres you wouldn’t touch before (and no, they’re not all erotica).

I’d like to see you lead the way into e-publishing but again, you didn’t get in gear until the above-mentioned trailblazers kicked your butts. Apparently not even Baen was able to get to you like those three did.

INDEPENDENT BOOKSELLERS

The consignment system of inventory management is, I believe, in its late afternoon and Barnes & Noble CEO Riggio wants to push it into that good night. Agent Richard Curtis (and foresightful creator of e-Reads) points out that it’s not going away–on the dead-tree book brick’n’mortar playground, but, he says,

You’re welcome to try to reform the old business, Mr. Riggio, but that’s no longer where the game is being played. While bookstore chains have battened on the consignment system, a new, virtually returns-free distribution model has arisen based on Internet fulfillment, prepaid orders printed on demand, and on e-books, a format that Mr. Riggio’s company abandoned years ago.

So I think Mr. Curtis saying, “Ya snooze, ya lose.”

Oh, also? Quit being snobs about what you stock. The blog post Helping Those Who Help Themselves in which Wendy Crutcher states,

The vast majority of independents have done an excellent job of convincing me over the years that my reading choices are 1) poor 2) not valid and 3) that I must be an uneducated moron with latent Fabio fantasies. So why exactly do I want to encourage their narrow-minded way of thinking by giving them my hard earned money? I’d much rather give my money to an evil corporation that has a well-stocked romance section.

and followup comments were depressing observations (albeit by definition anecdotal) about what independent booksellers stock and what they don’t. If people don’t converge on your stores with vibrating credit cards in their hands, it’s probably because you don’t care about what they’d like to buy … because you can send them back to the publisher on consignment and not worry about stocking to your customers’ preferences. Nice. Which part of “Romance fiction is the biggest fiction category in 2007” do you not get? Apparently, Title Wave in Alaska(!) is the Cool Girl you should all be imitating.

One good place to start your renaissance might be the Espresso Books. If America still had the malls of my youth, there could be a POD book kiosk right next to the food court.

Commenter JulieW8 said in a previous post:

The publishing industry sounds a lot like the music industry and I think it is and will continue to experience a lot of the same kinds of pains due to emerging technologies, wider acceptance of digital media, distribution through organic and nontraditional means, coupled with the demand by readers to read more than what is hand-picked for them and the innovation by authors seeking to deliver their stories to the masses.

Independent booksellers, let me present your future (from printisdead.com):

Yeah, so I’m not really all about the bisexual historical romance (“a man in love with his wife and his boyfriend”), but what I am about is when self-publishing serves its purpose, which is to say, it gained an audience and a traditional NY publisher’s attention.

Woman’s got guts and somehow got the attention of people who usually don’t review print-on-demand. Again, it’s something I’ve been seeing for a while now, that POD/self (not necessarily to be confused with vanity/subsidy) is gaining more credibility as the writing community decides to believe in its product and go forth alone. I think as more quality work comes out from the fringes of Traditional Publishing, more of the reading public will begin to pay attention.

As for having been picked up by a traditional NY publisher, I’m not sure I’d’a gone that route once I’d gone through all the trouble to self-pub, but there’s no doubt she’ll get a wider audience for her story and that is, after all, what most writers are after.

What I’m also about are the niche markets that are underserved. Once I heard a story about a taste tester for a fast-food chain and that its choice of BBQ sauce was based on what was least offensive to the most people. Whell. Look on any grocery store shelf and you’ll see that any numbers of taste/heat levels are offered; it’s just a matter of the customer finding which one he likes. On the other hand, if the customer doesn’t like any of them, he’ll just have to go make his own.

Oh, hey, kinda like Joseph Smith, right?

(Speaking of reviews of POD books, I read Mrs. Giggles’ reviews [particularly since her reading taste and mine seem to overlap a bit] [update 2019-09-30: Trojan warning; link removed] and just for fun, did a survey of her average scores of traditionally published books, ebooks from small epresses, and self-published/POD. I included the most current 14 books in each category. Traditionally published books scored an average of 67.5/100, ebooks from mostly Samhain scored an average of 76/100, and self-published/POD scored an average of 71.4/100. There’re a whole buncha hypotheses one could draw from the data I looked at, but it’s kinda fun to let the numbers roll around in your head for a while.)