External Monologue

I went to Book Camp last Saturday. I’ve been turning over jokes about it in my head (“this one time at book camp”, etc) but none of them are very satisfying. The event itself, though, was supremely satisfying. I had dinner with my soon-to-be-former colleagues at Parson Weems the next night, and Chris Kerr seemed surprised when I announced that I learned a LOT. I suppose this is due in part to my typical conference mode, which has always been to skip any and all sessions and spend time chatting up publishers on the trade floor. As an independent rep looking to drum up business, that’s what you do. But there wasn’t any of that at book camp; really the sessions were the only ‘there’ to be at. And what sessions! Great, great stuff from thoughtful folks. The format? Throw a bunch of clever book people (how I got in, I’ll never know) into a room and exhort them to come up with some interesting topics. Clearly a few came with topics ready to roll, and they were good. Actually, I came with topics ready to roll, but I chickened out. So I suppose the first thing I learned at Book Camp is:

1. Don’t Chicken Out:

I thought that I might start a session on the role of a sales representative in a digital sales environment. After listening to the sessions (booth moderators and attendees) Saturday, I know I would have gotten some very interesting, and useful, answers to questions I’ve been turning over lately about just what is it that reps are going to do in the future. My response to what appear to be coming seismic shifts in the business was to ditch my rep job and enroll in a computer science program. When I’m done with that program, I want to dive back into selling books with a new set of tools and, one hopes, a renewed sense of purpose. In the meantime, I’ve taken a part-time job managing NAIPR, the trade group for independent reps. So the questions on my mind are: will electronic catalogs and selling platforms replace reps? And how will reps be compensated for eBook sales? I suppose some would say that reps don’t have a role in the coming digital book world utopia, but my guess is that there will always be gatekeepers, and publishers will need to pay people who can maintain relationships with them. So I wish I had started the session. I will not chicken out next time.

What else did I learn? Here’s the rest of the list:

2. I learned how to give away eBooks

Jim Hanas gave a session called “DIY eBooks by the Numbers” (summary here: http://tumblr.com/xt3ywwd0j). It was quite a nerdy thrill to get some concrete information on where you can post eBooks, and what sort of response you can expect to receive. I learned that Feedbooks is an excellent venue for giving away eBooks, and I learned that Hanas’s efforts led to a contract with the excellent Canadian house ECW, who published his collection “Why They Cried” as an eBook. I’ve always believed that giving content away is an excellent route to building a writing career, and Hanas proved this in his session. Hanas also warmed my heart by looking back to the days when he was trying to load free Cory Doctorow novels into the Notes application on his iPod. I went through similar contortions to put manuscripts from small presses I sold onto o my Palm Pilot- I was reading eBooks this way 10 years ago. Those were the days.

3. Joke books sell as eBooks, too

Jeff Rutherford related during the Hanas session that he’s packaged and sold kid’s joke books on a variety of platforms, and he’s making money doing it. One key seems to be that I put some effort into getting a good cover designed, and it’s paid off with excellent placement on the nook. Lesson learned: pproduce a good looking book in an evergreen category, and you can move some “virtual units”. Promotional book publishers take note.

4. If you self publish an eBook, you can get instant feedback on your sales

Funny moment: Jim Hanas gave us a rundown of the expenses and income from his ECW eBook, “Why They Cried”, and noted that he hasn’t been able to see the effect on sales from his ads on facebook, Google, HTMLGiant, etc, because his contract with ECW only gives him accounting on sales annually. Meanwhile, Jeff Rutherford is checking his sales each morning (probably right around the time I’m checking the status of my Facebook Scrabble games). Jim Hanas pointed out that here’s something publishers wouldn’t want you to know- here’s a self published author having a better experience than an author working with a traditional publisher.

5. Love is like a mixtape

Okay, I always knew this, and I miss making mix tapes. But I don’t have atape deck anymmore, and when I rent a car, they have CD players. Does anyone even make mix CDs anymore? I just bring my mp3 player. Anyway, this was the title of a session Jason Boog (of Galleycat fame) gave, recalling a conversation he had recently with an indie rock promoter. Operating from the idea that the book world is going through the cataclysm the music world went through ten years or so ago, Jason offered lessons and advice for making things work in the new reality. This is all very scary stuff to be thinking about, especially the idea that the pie is going to get a lot smaller, and so we will have to learn to live with smaller incomes. This is not so encouraging, considering that many of us in bookworld already make a pittance!

6. use the 50/50 rule on Twitter

Jason warns against making your Twitter feed an rss feed, or a rundown of news about yourself. The idea is to mix in interesting news about other stuff, so your followers can learn from you as well as hear about what you are doing. Jason’s solution is to make sure that he follows a tweet about Galleycat with a tweet about someone else. He tries to stick to the alternating pattern, but admits that he breaks it on occasion for breaking news. I came away from the festivities realizing that I need to tweet more; I’ll make this my new year’s resolution if I fall down on the job in December.

7. You can “disintermediate the disintermediators” and still sell books

That was John Oakes cleverism, and by it he means that he’s bypassing the book trade’s distribution system (wholesalers, booksellers, and internet sellers) to sell his books direct to consumers. He joined Jason Boog’s session and told us about OR Books, his new publishing company. The plan is to spend more on advertising, and less (much less) on distribution. Essentially, he’s turned his back on more or less the entire trade book business, and as a result one book sold for OR is, financially, equivalent to five sold by a traditional publisher. I suspect that authors will shy away from this model (don’t they want to see their books in every store, airport news stand and turnpike rest stop?), but he seems to be doing well. OR’s biggest success has been with “Going Rouge”, a parody of Sarah Palin’s book by a similar name. Oakes ended up selling the rights to it once Going Rouge took off- this is a key part of his strategy. Essentially, when something works this well, the book trade wants to see a lot of copies out there, which on the tale end generate a lot of returns. So OR takes a gamble and takes the payday up front for a happening book. They then have the luxury of using the money and time to develop something new, while someone else handles the chaos of a bestseller.

8. The key to successful book publicity is to “pick authors with fabulous names”

That was Richard Nash’s cleverism, imparted in an interview with Lauren Cerand. The real takeaway from their session “Post Media Publicity” wasn’t careful authorial name-choosing, but rather that publicists can no longer rely on mainstream media only to sell books. Lauren Cerand’s realization of this came when she heard Richard Nash say, some time ago, that an A+ in EW would sell about 100 copies of a title with his old publisher, Soft Skull. So what to do? Focus a large portion of your publicity efforts on blogs and websites that relate specifically to the work you are promoting. The audience you are targeting may be smaller, but it’s so much more focused on what you are promoting. Also, don’t rely solely on presentations to gatekeepers such as NPR producers, review page editors, etc. Rather, focus on influencing the people who influence the gatekeepers. In part, this brings us back to the bloggers and websites.

9. Twitter is like fairy dust

This sounded way too fanciful until Richard Nash compared Twitter more to the dust/smoke/whatever that thieves or spies spray around in those movies where you see them rappelling into a vault, dressed like ninjas, to steal the hope diamond or nuclear launch codes. The dust reveals the red laser lines of the motion sensors for the alarm system, in much the same way that Twitter reveals the connections between people in our business. Once you get a good feel for all the tweeters in your account and they way they interact with each other, you can see a set of relationships that you just can’t see any other way. Actually, that sounds like a good idea for a twitter app- some sort of graphical representation of the way your contacts interact…

10. a media mention without a link is not so useful

Dailylit pointed out that, when her service was mentioned in the New York Times, she received a fraction of the traffic she received from Boing Boing. There are lots of reasons for it, but very important is that NYT doesn’t provide links for companies they mention. Why not? (also, who was that nice person I met from Dailylit? I can’t find her name anywhere, and of course I didn’t write it down).

11. Groupon provides customer email with a low acquisition cost

Ann Kingman (Random House, blogger extraordinaire) and Jenn Northington (Word, Greenpoint’s Bookstore events manager and social media genius) hosted a session called “Bookstores: Who Needs ‘em”, which Ann first suggested because, as sessions were being suggested early in the day, not one person suggested bookstores. Jenn proposed something related, and so they were merged, and we had an interesting discussion that unfortunately didn’t produce solutions for brick-and-mortar retail. But a very interesting side effect of Simon’s controversial Groupon promotion was mentioned. The idea being that Simon, through Groupon, acquired a massive list of email addresses for motivated book buyers through Groupon, for an extremely low price: free. Yes, the books were sold for 50% off, but that’s pretty close to their effective discount to indies (who generally get something in the mid 40s, plus free freight, which can amount to 5%). But what they are going to do is continue to cut out retailers with this list. This is an extremely discouraging result for booksellers, and it speaks volumes for trade publisher’s disregard for a channel that they will greatly miss if it disappears.

There you have it, a fairly good summation of what I learned at Book Camp. I’m sure I learned more, but I didn’t write any of that stuff down. Super, mega thanks for the organizers and the brave folks who moderated sessions. I would love to see more events like this. How could they fold something like this into a bigger event like ALA, BEA or Comicon? Could a book camp be part of something like the Brooklyn Book Festival? I don’t know, but I’m really looking forward to the next one.