Changes in the Romance e-Book Market

The erotic romance publishers blog recently asked readers if they thought per-title romance e-book sales were down. My answer would be yes. It is a tougher market than it used to be. The following post discusses possible reasons for the downturn, and the ways in which romance e-book publishers are trying to adapt to the changing market conditions.

Vulture.com recently published a piece profiling troubles at Ellora’s Cave, the pioneering publisher of e-book “romantica”. According to Vulture.com, the once insanely profitable publishing company has been seriously impacted by self-publishing platforms like Kindle Direct, and the Kindle Unlimited subscription service. Most authors and readers have seen this firsthand: the romance e-book market is swamped with free books, ultra cheap books, and thousands and thousands of self-published books. All romance e-book publishers, not just Ellora’s Cave, are having a tough time competing.

The modern e-book romance reader is offered an embarrassment of riches. Without some reason to be loyal to a particular author or certain publisher, the reader may well choose a book simply because it's cheap. As long as the reader is sufficiently entertained, they’ll be back, looking for more of the same. They won't care if books are self-published or not. It’s the dog-eat-dog nature of the free-enterprise system.

A whole industry has sprung up to support and inflate the visibility of self-published romance e-books. Many of these schemes are highly unethical, some are not. But that’s the subject of another post.

How is the romance e-book publishing industry responding to these changes? The solutions pretty well scare me. For example, Ellora’s Cave has been accused of failing to pay authors' royalties on time, if at all. This publisher is also attempting to publish non-romance genres. Ellora's Cave is not the only one. Samhain, a high quality romance e-book publisher, has made a significant investment in horror fiction.

Although more ethical than not paying authors, I believe diversification into other genres is not a smart business move. Legendary Wall Street investor Peter Lynch termed that kind of overreach “diworsification.” He suggests that a business that diversifies too widely risks messing up the original business because management time, energy and resources are diverted. Sure, there may be fewer non-romance e-book titles to compete with, but so what? Romance readers are voracious. Readers of other genres may not be. How many failures before a romance e-book publisher figures out what makes a superior, best-selling non-romance book? How long will it take to determine who the new audience is, and how to entice them into purchasing? That may well be why Carina Press abandoned its efforts to publish straight science fiction.

The changing market has also resulted in changing submission requirements. For example, Carina Press is no longer accepting short novella length romance fiction. Samhain isn’t accepting submissions at all.

These are interesting times.

Reviews and Conflict of Interest

You won't see me reviewing BDSM fiction on my blog anytime soon, because I wouldn't be objective. I'd be too tempted to write a snotty review of a book competing with mine. Especially if I didn't like it to begin with. Or maybe I'd praise a book if the writer had sensibilities similar to mine. That's not to say all writers who review books in their genre are unethical. Necessarily. But it is tough to avoid the appearance of conflict of interest.

There are plenty of reviewers who review despite conflicts of interest. These include well-regarded review bloggers who also offer editing services, and review bloggers who also sell author PR packages. Conflict of interest doesn't automatically mean unethical. Presumably a reviewer could ignore the fact that they are being paid (or have been paid, or will be paid) by that selfsame author to perform a different duty. But it is a conflict of interest, irrespective of claims of special safeguards.

Many reviewers are ethical, yet useless. They don't seem to have any standards. Amazon "Top Reviewer" Harriet Klausner is an infamous example. She reviews ten books a day, awarding most of them five stars. To be fair, in the early days of Amazon, she was a prolific, but legitimate reviewer. In the 1990s, I got the feeling she even read the books she reviewed. I doubt she reads them now. Another mass review source on amazon is Midwest Book Review. They award only five star reviews. 65,000 five stars to date. Can all 65,000 of those books really be extraordinary?

Outright scammy reviewers abound. These include the amazon "sock puppets". A sock puppet is an author who gives herself a five star review, often under a fake account. I recently read about an author who had given himself three five star reviews (out of nine reviews). The author was outed on the amazon forums, and suddenly two of the three fake five star reviews disappeared.

Reviews by family and friends are both useless and scammy. Here's a typical one:

This book is really really good. I couldnt put it down. I read it so fast cause the words just flow and I had to know what was going to happen next. Highly recommond this book. Awesome is all I can say!!! ;0)

Such reviews are pretty easy to spot because there will be a cluster of them, all posted within a few days. The reviewers will also have only reviewed that one book. Evidently no other book was as awesome!!!;0). Some authors will arrange review exchanges with other authors: if you give me a five star review, I'll give you a five star review. I consider this unethical. These reviews are often well-written, and are harder to ferret out as fake without doing some cyber-sleuthing. Fake review determination is truly a science. But if a book sells a few copies a month, yet has 51 five star reviews, you can bet the author is gaming the system.

The author who has no friends or family can always buy a fake review. Only five bucks!

See also:


Red Adept: Reviews and Editing
It's Promotion but is it Smart?
Erotic Anthology Editor also Erotic Romance Reviewer
Name that Sock Puppet Amazon Forum
Harriet Klausner Appreciation Society Blog
Midwest Book Review Talks About Amazon.com

When Greed Trumps Civility: Amazon Spam Revisited

I've blogged several times about Amazon's new rules forbidding promotion outside of the "Meet our Authors" forum. But that hasn't stopped people from trying--and trying again. A few days ago, one author promoted his self-pubbed book on the Kindle forum. He was told politely to stop. Rather than apologize, and make a move to become part of the forum community, he emailed one of the women who'd advised him to stop promoting. He then posted this rant (reproduced in part) on his personal blog. Other than the stalkerish misogyny, his viewpoint is quite typical of the spurned spammer:

I strolled into Amazon this weekend to browse around... I’d unwittingly wandered into the Amazon equivalent of a pack of street thugs, roving bands of opportunists taking advantage of the faceless anonymity of the web to prey upon others. Seems I’d broken a rule by self-promoting my book in there.

...So I looked into some of their backgrounds, and found that one woman (the apparent leader who seemed to set the tone) liked to give hatchet-job book reviews. 
..

I contacted the authors on the receiving end of several of these reviews...One voiced the probability that she has a dog because she can’t keep a man around because none will have her, and this is her revenge and bitter outlet for her rage. After experiencing her and her little pack tearing away at me, that thought carries some real merit, and does seem probable, with her aptly-chosen nic “[name deleted by January]" Another author indicated that she needed to get L^!d, which I found a bit offensive – for the poor soul "saddled" with that distasteful task.

...once we step outside the invisible walls of our literary world, we are - upon occasion - going to encounter a less enlightened element. [Those unsavory few] live to create chaos - the way writers live to create art, poetry, and beauty.

Hey dude! Another name for those street thugs and "less enlightened element" is a reader.

Links

Amazon Kindle Spam: Direct Publishing System Gets Gummed By Influx Of Junk eBooks

From the Huffington Post:

The wave of ebook spam crashing over the Kindle could undermine [Amazon's] push into self-publishing.

Here spam refers to crap ebooks or plagiarized content, uploaded to Amazon only to make a quick profit. According to James McQuivey, an eReader analyst at Forrester Research, the solution to the problem is a form of Amazon social networking.

If the company can let readers see book recommendations from people they know, or people whose reviews they liked in the past, that would help them track down the content they want and avoid misleading recommendations.

That sounds a whole lot like Goodreads, an existing social network for readers.

Perhaps Amazon's new enforcement of community guidelines (including deleting sock puppet reviews and spam book announcements) is phase one of Amazon's new, more valuable, social networking system.


The Real Force Behind Ebook Sales: Heaving Bosoms

FoxNews.com provides a nice collection of tired cliches about romance readers, including referencing romance fiction as "salacious chick lit". Fox has evidently just discovered romance drives the fiction market.

How Not to Sell Books on Amazon

The amazon forums are fascinating. Each forum has a distinct culture, and unwritten rules.

The romance forum, for example, hates author spammers. Spamming violates the TOS of the forums. The romance folk take this prohibition seriously. If a poster so much as has a link to their book in their sig line, the post will be down-voted, and the whole post will functionally disappear. The romance folk chase away the spammers, one by one, as they pop up. It's the cyber analog of torch and pitchfork. And because of that, the romance forum is lively and valuable, with genuine book recommendations and fabulous discussions.

In contrast, the related erotica and erotic romance forums are nearly barren. The threads have been completely overrun by self-published authors hawking their books. Such authors participate in the online societies only to sell, repeating their posts again and again, just as fast as Amazon deletes them.

There's been a recent reader uprising on the erotic and erotic romance forums. Spammers have been confronted. The spammers respond with entitlement (how else do I sell my book?) or counter-attacks, or even cries of being "bullied".

Someone came up with the idea to "tag" spammer-books with "spam" and "spammer". Unfortunately one of the spammers took offense at the tag war. This author electronically hunted down one of her taggers--and her family. The tagger's son was contacted by this e-mail at his job:

Subject Line: Your Wife is Sick

Message: Tell your sick wife {name deleted} that if she comes after my books with her tags again, or gets her friends too, I'll be advertising your company in a bad way all over the internet. She is affecting my income and I'll do the same back.

Sadly, this particular author is not even the worst of the vanity spammers. And likely she's not even the most insane. Amazon needs to do something about this "harmless" self-promotion.

Pigeonholing Genius

Angela James of Carina Press recently blogged about rejections, listing a bunch of reasons why Carina won't reject manuscripts. Two of them concerned genre. Angela said Carina won’t reject a manuscript because it falls in too many genres or because it falls in too “niche” a genre. Carina also won’t reject a story because it isn’t a genre that seems hot right now or because it’s in an unusual time, place or setting. If it’s a good book, the publisher will find a spot for it.

An acquaintance of mine is struggling with genre. She’s writing what I would call a military SF romance. But she refuses to call her novel SF--or even romance. Her fiction is something unique. She’s upset that publishers will expect her to categorize her story. She’s also afraid if she assigns too many genres, her manuscript will get tossed out or deleted unread. She believes publishers are too strict and formulaic. In an effort to be sympathetic, one of her friends pointed to Harlequin as a prime example of a publisher determined to pigeonhole genius.

The whole conversation annoyed me, and not just because I’m a Harlequin author. Harlequin has a ton of different imprints and series. True, each imprint or series has some basic heat-level/plotline requirements. That's so the devoted reader can be reliably satisfied. But Harlequin as a whole? The publisher has only one requirement: the story has to be a romance with a happily ever after. That’s it. And with Spice, Spice Briefs and the Carina Press imprints, that's probably not even true anymore.

Aside from the unfairness of pointing at poor Harlequin as the pinnacle of closed-mindedness, I think it’s a bad idea to indulge an author’s genre whining. The Amazon boards are full of self-published authors complaining about the rigidity of the standard publishing world. Here’s an example:

The publishers may not be able to devote the time to think creatively about marketing an unusual, genre-tangential book. But it's [sic] creator can… And now we have a world of options. [Self-publishing, I suppose]. It beats papering the walls with rejection slips from those who lack our vision.

Here’s another one:

I thought it might be of interest both to readers and to writers here at Amazon to consider the genre of "sensuous literary fiction" as a possible alternative to "Erotica." ... If you've got a book that you feels more accurately fits into this newer category, we'd love to hear about it.

Authors who use the genre excuse for rejections aren’t doing themselves any favors. Why bother getting better at writing or learning about your market if you can always claim your masterpiece wasn’t published because the publishers are idiots? I’m also bugged by authors who describe themselves as “literary”, as if “literary” is just another word for superior fiction, not a genre with strict requirements of its own.

On one of these Amazon forums, a self-described visionary suggested using “tags”, rather than genre, as a way to circumvent the indignity of assigning genre. I guess I don’t see the big difference. Tags, if they say anything about the book, are defining the genre. At most, a tag will also describe sub-genre or niche.

Self-publishing fiction doesn’t give an author a pass on having to figure out genre. "Special" or "unique" isn't nearly descriptive enough to be genre. And genre is what readers use to decide what to read.

Here are a few interesting blogs on genre:

The academician's view of the romance genre

How to determine the genres of your mutt masterpiece

Demagoguery and Erotica

According to a few angry Amazon.com authors, Amazon is "purging" self-published erotica e-books. That's not quite true. Erotica titles are not being purged. Amazon is deleting incest stories--most of them involving an underage character.

To my mind, incest and pedophilia are inseparable. Both pathologies involve exploitation of the weaker. There is no consent. Unfortunately, discussion and refinement of these concepts on the Amazon forums is pretty well futile. Anything less than blanket sympathy arouses indignation by the "victimized" writers. One of the banned authors tells the forum that incest fiction must be published by amazon because mainstream erotica publishers won't touch it. Entitlement, much? Disagreement is met with contempt. One of these authors writes: “Why are you posting on an erotica forum if you don’t like erotica?”

The subtext of this self-serving statement is this: if you don’t embrace pedo-incest erotica, you don’t embrace any erotica. This antilogic pisses me off. Some random author doesn't get to tell me what erotica is, or isn't. He doesn't get to decide what society will or will not accept, either. Related sentiments are trotted out on the kink boards. "You have to accept all perversion--even pedophilia--because you people are perverted." Nope. The kink boards, like collarme, have very strict rules about pedo pics or pedo fiction. Such material is quickly reported and removed.

Morality and erotica are not mutually exclusive. Decency in BDSM is not an oxymoron. Even if you live on the edge, you can still have standards.

Near as I can figure, amazon does.

Amazon Selling Pedophile's Guide

A self-published book entitled The Pedophile's Guide to Love and Pleasure: A Child-Lover's Code of Conduct was released on Kindle about a week ago. Justifiably, this book has created a firestorm of opposition. The amazon forums are burning up, and the book has collected hundreds of one star reviews. Amazon is evidently removing the one star reviews as fast as they appear. I have no doubt that the book will soon be removed, despite the fact that it's selling briskly.

Here's the author's description:

This is my attempt to make pedophile situations safer for those juveniles that find themselves involved in them, by establishing certian rules for these adults to follow. I hope to achieve this by appealing to the better nature of pedosexuals, with hope that their doing so will result in less hatred and perhaps liter sentences should they ever be caught.

Sic in more ways than one. Juveniles "that find themselves involved in" such abuse should get help from the authorities, not read this book.

Edit: The book is gone from amazon.com