Billboard – Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Glocalization (Generational Change)

Kristine Kathryn Rusch — Sun, 30 Mar 2025 15:28:16 +0000

I do most of my business writing on Patreon these days, but roughly once per month, I’ll put a post for free on this website. This post initially went live on my Patreon page on December 22, 2024. If you go to Patreon, you’ll find other posts like this one.

Glocalization

In the past year, I have started to read Billboard regularly. The music industry is always ten years ahead of traditional publishing, and the music industry has already figured out how to handle the small mountain of data that each song, each stream, produces.

The fantasy-novel-sized Grammy Preview issue that came out in October took a while to get through, but it had a lot of gems. Some pertain only to my business, so I’m sharing those with the staff. There were also some lovely nuggets that I’ve posted either here (or will post here) as well as in my November Recommended Reading List.

But one article on business really caught my attention. Headlined “U.S. Artists Are Dominating The Global Charts,” the article explored the way that music crosses international boundaries.

The premise here was that in 2022, 85% of the hits on the Bilboard Global chart came from outside of the U.S. In 2023, 92% of the hits on that same chart were not from the U.S.

But in 2024, over 60% of the hits on the global chart came from the U.S. All fascinating, all important for the music industry.

It’s a change that the U.S. welcomes, of course. It’s also what’s new is old. Early in my childhood, the bulk of the music in the U.S. came from England. (British Invasion, anyone?) And then, throughout the seventies—with the exception of Abba and Olivia Newton John—most of the music worldwide came from the U.S.

That changed with the advent of streaming. Then the cost of making and marketing music plummeted. As Will Page, former chief economist for Spotify told Billboard last year, “When the cost structure changes, local [music] bounces back.”

Page should know. He and Chris Dalla Riva, a musical artist and senior product manager at the streaming service Audiomark wrote a paper on this topic in 2023.

They examined the top ten songs in four countries—France, Poland, the Netherlands, and Germany. In 2012, local artists accounted for less than 20% of the song market in those countries. Ten years later, that number had flipped considerably, with the rise the biggest in Poland, where fully 70% of the top ten songs were local.

Here’s the part that caught me…and got me thinking about publishing.

The authors call this shift “glocalization.” This all points to a growing marketplace where the power has been devolved from global record labels and streaming platforms to their local offices and from linear broadcast models to new models of streaming which empower consumers with choice.

There are still the big performers, of course. They tend to get enough press so that people will hear of their songs and sample. But, as the article points out, if Polish rap is big in Poland along with, say Sabrina Carpenter, there’s a slimmer chance that Polish rap is big in France, but Sabrina Carpenter might be.

Replace all these names with Nora Roberts and Stephen King. They have built-in audiences worldwide who are looking for their next book. But those audiences might want something that has a lot more local flavor for the rest of the big sales.

Not to mention the language barrier. That’s not as big a deal in music. People have grown up listening to music in other languages. Heck, opera would not exist without afficionados being willing to listen to gorgeous, sweeping melodies in a language they do not understand.

But reading books in another language requires you to understand that language. Translation programs only go so far. They usually lack the finesse of a translator. The good translators add their own artistry to the work. (The bad ones are…well…bad.)

It’s easier to translate nonfiction, particularly if it’s utilitarian (as in how-to books). But utilitarian books usually don’t rise to the top of the charts. Nonfiction is often stubbornly local. I do care about the political situation in France, but not enough to pick up a translated book about it or to attempt to read (or listen to) an AI translation of it.

My reading time is limited, and I’d rather use it on things that really interest me.

Fortunately for most of us, though, English is the most widely spread language in the world. In 2024, 1.52 billion people worldwide spoke English in 186 countries. Only 25% of those people are native speakers. Everyone else learned it as a second (or third or fourth) language.

And…over fifty percent of websites worldwide use English for their content.

Our books in English can and do sell outside of the U.S. and other English-speaking countries.

Which brings us to the other part of this article that really caught my attention—marketing. U.S. music labels now run global campaigns for some of their product or, as the article says, are…

…even starting promotion abroad, in territories where marketing is cheaper and fandom can be more of a social activity, before [the companies] begin a push stateside.

There was even more strategy on this buried in an article from the November 16^th issue. In a piece about the co-founders of Broke Records, there was this little gem about marketing to Eastern Europe and Latin America.

The question: Why those territories? And the answer:

Cheaper cost and these markets start a lot of trends on the internet.

The founders go on to explain that there’s a tipping point where influencers will jump on board to promote because they see the song getting bigger in other markets.

All of this caught my attention because it feels so familiar. In the 1990s, before the U.S. book distribution system collapsed, book marketing was aggressively local. Some writers sold well in certain regions of the country or in certain large marketplaces such as, say, Detroit or Los Angeles.

If those books sold a lot more than usual or if they started dominating the conversation more and more, then the publishers would push harder in other regions.

The publishers soon learned that some books did not cross over, not matter how much money was put behind them. Others took off quickly. It was predictable on some level—local authors tended to sell best in their local regions—but not predictable in others. Why did gentle contemporary fantasy sell well in the American South, but not in big Eastern cities? No one cared enough to put in the legwork to get the data, in those days before computers.

Now, that information might be available with the right kind of market research.

While we would all like our books to sell equally well in every single country, that’s not going to happen. (Remember that there are 186 countries where English is spoken. There are nine where English is not spoken much at all.)

The key here isn’t to become a dominant worldwide bestseller, but to use the data available to us to see where we’re doing well. If we can target those areas where our work is already selling, then we might be able to leverage that and increase the sales.

The increased sales will lead to all kinds of other opportunities, from licensing games and other products (even local films) including—you guessed it—some kinds of translations.

I love this term “glocalization” because it breaks down the gigantic world into bite-sized pieces. With the way that data works these days, we can actually view these pieces without doing a lot of guessing about them. You’ll know if your books are selling well in Australia, but not doing well at all in Austria. Or vice versa.

And if you have limited marketing dollars, like all of us do, you’ll target places where your name is already familiar…unless you want to grow your work in a part of the world that is similar (you hope) to another place where you are doing well.

Also, a lot of online distributors have targeted ad-sharing and/or marketing opportunities. You might want to take part in a bundle of ads that focus on the Sydney area and not do a similarly priced promotion in London.

It’s your choice, which is, in my opinion, fun.

If you do this right, you can also adopt the right mindset. Instead of saying, Yeah, I’m a bestseller in Italy but nowhere else as if that’s a problem, understand that being a bestseller anywhere is great and work to grow your audience in that country—as well as worldwide.

Yes, we’d all like to be the biggest bestsellers in the biggest markets in the world, but that’s not really happening with any writers any more. Glocalization has hit us all. A book might take off, but a writer rarely does these days.

Things are changing, and in a way that we can all understand.

Realize, like the U.S. music labels have after their banner international year of 2024, that the success is due to a confluence of events, not to their increased marketing.

As the first article notes:

Executives contend the uptick is partly due to random chance. A surfeit of American heavy hitters including Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, Billie Eilish, Ye, Ariana Grande, Future, Taylor Swift and Post Malone have dropped albums this year. At the same time international powerhouses…have been quiet.

Random chance. That’s all we have. So write your work, market it everywhere, and then look at the data on occasion, particularly when you have marketing money. Give your marketing strategy some thought.

Just accept where you’re at and figure out how to move forward—without taking too much time away from the writing.

Because that’s all we can do.

Business Musings: Barnes & Noble

Kristine Kathryn Rusch — Thu, 18 Oct 2018 00:49:59 +0000

Recently, I went to one of the three Barnes & Noble Bookstores here in Las Vegas. I had decided to read everything in a bestselling author’s series, and I knew I could find most of the books in that series at B&N. I wanted them all right away, in paper, so I could binge.

I knew B&N would have that series because the author is a major bestseller. If I had wanted, say, something from any one of a dozen writers whose work I love and am currently reading, I wouldn’t have taken the time to drive to B&N. I would have ordered from Amazon because it’s easy and convenient, and here in Vegas, I usually get the books the next day.

The B&N experience was not that different from the experience I would have had on any given day in 1995. The layout was the same as it had been then. The café looked inviting, and the place was swarming with customers on a Thursday afternoon.

I had forgotten how much I missed the large chain bookstore experience. Until…I tried to ask about a book that wasn’t by a mega-selling author. Then the clueless employees irritated me. They did what employees of large stores often do—they went to the place I had just come from and looked around as I didn’t have the ability to look for something on my own. (Even though I told them that I had just been to that section.) They didn’t know the difference between an anthology and a novel. They told me to go to their website and order from there.

Because I like to amuse myself, I then asked them about books by the Big Name author whose work I’d come to buy. I had already checked to make sure the books I wanted were there—and all but one of them (the most recent) was—but I hadn’t picked them up yet.

No one on staff had heard of this author, even though her books are the basis of a major TV series. The store had an entire shelf unit devoted to her novels. But nope, the B&N staff had no idea.

And that’s when I recalled why I had stopped going to big box stores and would go to indies (such as Powell’s in Portland) or would go online with Amazon.

Still, as I stood in the middle of that gigantic store, surrounded by other people who were browsing books, enjoying the scent of coffee and paper dust, I realized how much I missed coming into stores like that to check for my books. Once upon a time, the buyer for B&N actually saved my career by putting in an order for my work for every single B&N store that then existed. This was 1992 or thereabouts, and he was able, with the push of a button, to move several thousand copies.

Those days are long gone. The days of going into a bookstore and finding unusual books are gone. A few months ago, I checked out one of the local indies here and was startled to see all the bestsellers—mostly literary bestsellers (the kind you want on your coffee table to impress your guests, if that’s your thing), but still. I had expected quirky, off-beat books, and I didn’t see a one. Not even one that was local to Las Vegas.

I left, very disappointed.

Booksellers who specialize in new and used do a lot better than booksellers who are just peddling new books. In the new/used stores, you can find one-of-a-kind items or that book you didn’t even know you were looking for.

Dean and I own stores that carry used books, as well as older comics. We don’t sell new books at our stores, though, unless they’re WMG books.

I do miss the 20^th century bookstore experience—from a reader perspective. As a writer, that experience was always fraught. Were my books in the store? If so, were there enough copies—as in more than one? If not, why not?

Back then, though, the only way a reader could get my books was at a store. Which was the presence of the book in sufficient numbers was the only way to make sure my career remained viable. That’s why I would occasionally do (the much hated) book signing at a major chain store. If one store in the chain sold a lot of copies, the other stores in the chain would pick up the books.

There were a lot of games that savvy writers could play to make sure their books were on the shelves. Romance writers used to get up at dawn and bring donuts to the truckers who delivered the books. Back then, those truckers would often place the books on the shelves. If you gave that trucker donuts, he would make sure your book got excellent placement.

And so on and so forth.

The days of the megastores were short—only about 20-25 years—but they had a major imprint on writers. We all want to see our books in traditional bookstores, even now.

I checked when I went into that B&N to see if I had any published work in the store. I found a lot of my stuff, mostly in those dreaded anthologies, but also some tie-in titles (still!). None of the more recent novels, but I could have easily ordered any of those novels on the B&N website. (Putting me in the same company as the mega bestseller whose most recent novel was not on the stands.)

Old habits. Old dreams.

It’s hard to let go of them.

And now comes the news that B&N is up for sale. Or something like that. Because there are a lot of shareholder shenanigans going on, as well as lawsuits, stock…well, if I say manipulation, I’m accusing them of something illegal and that’s not quite the case.

I’ve read a lot of analysis about what’s going on at B&N in the past week, and the two best comments I’ve seen have come from Passive Guy and a blog that Dean wrote.

Passive Guy wrote on October 3:

…this level of visible turmoil at BN has to be a drop in the bucket compared to the internal turmoil in the organization. Anybody who is not flooding the world with résumés is living in an alternate reality.

Dean believes (and other analysts agree with him) that B&N will most likely shut down. He writes:

I seriously doubt anyone will buy them. Can’t see a reason for anyone to take over those massive mall leases and aging inventory at this point. Again, same exact issue Borders had. And if the major publishers start cutting off B&N credit, nothing left but the clean-up.

At one point it was thought the folks who own Kobo could take it, but they are now with Walmart, a much better solution. It has been rumored that Amazon could grab it, but why would they bother with all that old stuff when they can build hundreds of new stores for less money?

Or, as Craig Johnson of the consulting firm Customer Growth Partners told Billboard:

If [the potential buyer] is [B&N founder and chairman Leonard] Riggio, if he had some secret sauce to reinvent the bookstore for the 21st century, why hasn’t he done that in his time there?

Yeah. No matter how you look at it, B&N is done for. The stores that were such a fixture in the last decade of the previous century are a relic now.

The problem is this: that relic lives in the imagination of countless writers. I have heard writer after writer say that the reason they want a print deal on their books is so that they can see their work in Barnes & Noble.

They specifically mention B&N because it’s one of the last surviving big chain stores. These writers seem to know how hard it is to get a book into a small indie store. But they see B&N as the stepping stone to the New York Times bestseller list.

B&N hasn’t been that store in a long time. You want to hit one of the lists? Your books need to be available online in print, ebook, and (if possible) audiobook format. People order most of their books online.

Readers still like to go into bookstores, because browsing is easier in a bookstore. But readers have become used to ordering their books online. I have had an Amazon account since 1997, and back then, I was one of the few people who ordered books online.

Now almost everyone does. In fact, according to Mike Shatzkin, Amazon sells more than half of all print books, and B&N sells less than a fifth.

And…here’s the thing: it’s easy to get your print books on Amazon. As an indie writer. Without a big publisher behind you.

And that’s just in the U.S.

Amazon has inroads in many other countries, and sells English language books there (as well as books in other languages).

In the U.S., we talk about Amazon versus B&N as if that’s a big rivalry. It was in the early part of this century. It is no longer.

And even back then, it was only a rivalry in the United States.

In comments all over Facebook on the day that B&N’s sale got announced, residents of other countries didn’t understand the fuss. All of them had tried to order books from B&N and found it impossible. B&N only served the U.S. market (or maybe the North American market: I’m not sure of the details, and don’t really want to know).

If you want to know the history of that rivalry, check out this summary from Axios.

So, sadly, the writers who go with a traditional publisher to get their books into “big” stores like Barnes & Noble are working off a 20^th century model. They’re losing a lot because of it.

Traditional publishers demand (as a deal-breaker) what is essentially all rights to a book for the life of the copyright. I’ve dealt with this in-depth before, and will deal with it again. Writers made this trade-off thinking they would get more exposure in bookstores and worldwide.

The truth is, they get less.

And now, those writers will suffer even more. If their books get released in the week that B&N goes under, they will lose all of those potential sales. A lot of writers will lose their livelihood that week. Even more will see their sales (post B&N) drop significantly, because the one thing (the only thing?) B&N did was help push the book in its week of release.

In the traditional publishing world, writers whose book sales decline are considered losers, no matter what the reason for the decline. Those writers won’t sell traditionally again because their “numbers are bad.”

Back in the day when B&N was the biggest game in town, that loss of a traditional publishing contract would be a nightmare. It was bad enough when Borders and Books-A-Million went down years ago.

But these days? The writers who are still pursuing a traditional-only career are living in the past. Even New York Times bestsellers aren’t making enough to live on. The older major bestsellers are seeing their sales numbers decline rapidly.

The publishing world has changed, and the writers who refused the change with it will suffer even more than they already are.

So, why on earth are traditional publishers still in business? What could they possibly gain by licensing a novel from a brand new writer?

Well, that’s pretty simple. The companies gain intellectual property. And IP adds to their bottom line.

I’ll deal with all of that in the next blog post. But if you can’t wait, look at Dean’s analysis here: https://www.deanwesleysmith.com/bn-in-trouble/

I still traditionally publish short stories and the occasional anthology (through a publisher that’s not WMG Publishing, that is). I would never, in today’s market, license a novel to a major publishing house. That’s foolhardy at best, detrimental to my career (and anyone else’s) at worst.

I like being able to go directly to the reader. Just like I do with this blog.

And here’s where I remind you that this blog is reader-supported. You can support it by sharing it or by occasionally donating to it.

If you feel like supporting the blog on an on-going basis, then please head to my Patreon page.

If you liked this post, and want to show your one-time appreciation, the place to do that is PayPal. If you go that route, please include your email address in the notes section, so I can say thank you.

Which I am going to say right now. Thank you!

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The Business Rusch: Dreams and Bestsellers

Kristine Kathryn Rusch — Thu, 01 Aug 2013 06:43:49 +0000

Because of this blog, I see a lot of publishing contracts. People want advice on certain clauses. I tell folks that I can’t give legal advice because I’m not a lawyer, but I will look at the contract and tell them if they need to hire a lawyer to negotiate it. Most of the time (99.9% of the time), they need that lawyer, and I will help them find a lawyer if need be.

What do I get out of this? I get to see the changes in publishing contracts, what’s being offered to new (and experienced) writers, what scams are hitting, and what to watch out for. The writers get, I hope, a hand to hold while they hire someone to give them legal advice.

Every now and then, though, I regret my decision to say yes. Because I see some contracts are nasty, nasty motherfuckers, and the proper response to those contracts is “Are you kidding?”

Here’s the problem with hiring anyone to negotiate those nasty horrible contracts: a lawyer does what you tell him to do. If you tell him to negotiate a bad contract, he will do all he can to improve it. But some contracts can’t be improved. Some contracts must be abandoned with a firm “no.” (In case you were wondering, that’s the 1% who don’t need a lawyer.)

If you hire a lawyer to look at your contract, and ask the lawyer to explain the contract to you, then ask the lawyer for advice on whether or not you should sign it, the lawyer will do that. But if you hire the lawyer to negotiate, the lawyer will negotiate as best he can. He might improve the contract, but in these cases, improvement moves you from the seventh circle of hell to the sixth circle of hell. And that’s all.

When faced with those contracts, I feel awful, because all I see is the massive catastrophe the poor naïve writer is heading toward two to five years down the road. The worst case scenario for these writers is success. They will make no money and their work (and sometimes their future work and/or name) will be owned, for all intents and purposes, by the publishing company.

I hate it when that happens. When I see it happen—as I did twice this summer—I cringe. Because I know what just occurred. I’ve watched very smart writers get hooked in their dreams. These writers will agree to anything—and I mean anything—to be legitimized by traditional publishing. These writers have long dreamed of being published by a great house or a great imprint, working with a great editor, and then seeing the finished product in their favorite bookstore.

And to achieve that dream, they’ll throw their copyrights, their future, everything under the proverbial bus.

I have long realized anyone can get hooked by a dream. If you want something bad enough, someone else can (and will) take advantage of you while promising that dream. I watched an old friend incur nearly $100,000 in debt because some Hollywood jackass promised my friend a movie deal “real soon now.” Real Soon Now never happened, so my friend had to go back to a day job to pay off the debt.

I fell for the agent myth for a long, long time, giving 15% of my money to people who did little or nothing for it, “negotiating” deals I’d already set up or, in the case of one agent, consistently tanking those deals with the promise of newer better deals that never materialized.

I can be as dumb as the next person. Dumber, in fact. The price of my stupidity is a lot of hard-earned stories from the publishing wars. I blog about much of it. Don’t think I’m on some high and mighty judgmental pedestal here. This thing I’m sitting on? I built it with my own two hands, one bad decision at a time.

I’m better now. I hope.

But one thing I do with regularity is try to find the lingering deep-seated dreams and figure out how to deal with them.

That sounds weird, I know. Dreams fuel us. But the dreams are also where the myths come from, and the myths can destroy a career.

Especially when the dreams are decades-old, forged in an entirely different publishing era.

I’ve been trying to revise one of my dreams for a while now. And this July, it finally got through my head that the old dream came from a world that’s now gone. The dream still lingers—I don’t think I can ever weed it out entirely—but I am aware of its potential dangers, and I’m going to do my best not to get hooked in this one.

The dream? Have one of my original novels on The New York Times bestseller list. Not any other bestseller list. The Times.

I’ve had original novels on bestseller lists all over the world. I’m pleased by this, thrilled by it in fact. Because those books had readers who bought in large numbers, and anything that measures reader response means a lot to me.

In fact, I’ve hit the USA Today bestseller list with my original novels, and that means a great deal to me, because I know that the list is calculated based on actual book sales, and compares books to books—fiction to nonfiction. Last I checked—and I’ll be honest, I did not check before writing this blog today—the USA Today list doesn’t isolate by genre, doesn’t work from a formula, doesn’t segregate bookstores from Costco. Books are books are books.

I love that.

Still, though, for me and my dreams, the gold standard is The New York Times. It’s the only list I saw when I was a kid, even though Publishers Weekly has a list that’s more than 100 years old. Even though other newspapers had lists.

I imprinted on the Times, and my dreams were formed then, back when I was very young.

I’d love to have New York Times bestseller under my name.

I could put New York Times bestseller beneath my name now, if I wanted to. A number of the media-tie in novels I worked on made the list and/or the extended list, back when the extended only went to #15. My Star Wars novel just missed the extended, for example, but was in the top 20. That was in the mid-1990s. Today, the extended goes all the way to the top 25.

I choose not to use the Times appellation, though, because when I do, I want to have achieved it for my original work. Yeah, yeah, that’s me, and a lot of people will argue with me. Hell, sensible me would argue with dream-hooked me, if it would only work. Because I was on the list, and as some of my good friends would remind me, that was one reason to write media tie-in novels.

But never for me. I always wrote tie-ins for the love. I loved those universes and was honored to play in them. That I got paid to do so was just a bonus.

I am still operating out of that dream, and I am aware of it. The problem is that the dream I had no longer reflects reality.

Back when I imprinted on the Times list, it had four components: hardcover fiction, hardcover non-fiction, paperback fiction, and paperback nonfiction. Right now, there are 12 lists for fiction, and 5 for nonfiction every week. Instead of 40 chances per week to hit the list proper (60 if you count the extended—and I’m not sure exactly when the Times started doing so), now you have 425 chances per week to hit the list in one way or another.

Back when traditional publishing was a monopoly, back when there were a large number of independent booksellers, back when there were a handful of chains and traditional publishers did not hate those chains, computing the list was pretty easy. The bookstores reported their sales and the Times used them to figure out the list.

In the 1990s, when I started paying attention to the way the list was compiled, the Times had a list of “accepted booksellers” so that it tweaked its list to reflect “accepted” tastes. The traditional publishers complained that a sale in the chains counted for less, and the Times responded by saying they used a “calculation” (which they still do), so that the lists don’t weigh big, hated firms where most readers buy too heavily. The Times list is an imprint of quality, after all, and when quality gets “compromised,” the Times monkeys with the list.

First the Times got rid of the influence of chains, by counting their sales as a percentage. Then the Times separated the mass market from the trade paperback list because “quality” fiction was published in trade paperback, while crap was published in mass market (along with the quality). Then, when Harry Potter dominated the list, the Times spun off a children’s list which I see now has devolved into four parts: picture books, Middle Grade, Young Adult, and series.

After much complaint, the Times developed an e-book list, but ignored indie published titles. When there was even more complaint, it added the indie published titles, but gave Amazon a percentage of sales rather than actual sales (even though it publishes the most e-books of any US venue).

In other words, the list is rigged. It has been rigged for decades, and it’ll stay rigged.

I know that, and I still want one of my original books on it.

Kinda.

Because here’s the thing that really got to me this July.

I’ve known for years now that a book can hit the list with only a few thousand copies sold, especially in hardcover. It all depends on the time of year that the book is published in (post-Christmas books need fewer sales to hit the list than books published in the September/October/November bestseller glut) and then there’s the matter of velocity.

The Times, like so many lists, cares more about how many books are sold per week, than how many books are sold per year. So if your book sells 52,000 copies in hardcover in 2013 at the pace of 1,000 copies per week, your book probably won’t hit a list. But if your hardcover novel sells 5,000 copies in July, the bulk of which are in the week of July 4^th, and then sells another 5,000 copies during the rest of year, for a 10,000 copy total sale, your book could easily hit the Times list in that first week of July—provided, of course, that your book was sold by the “approved” bookstores, and not at a discount through Costco or Wal-Mart.

These little quirks continually get reinforced for me by various bestseller list articles, like this one in The Wall Street Journal from earlier this year about authors buying their way onto the list with some targeted strategies. This has happened for years. Back in the 1990s, the Times list of approved bookstores got out—somehow—and a number of writers targeted those stores with the help of fans, and got some books onto the lists that “shouldn’t have been” on the list. The Times quickly clamped down on its leak, and found a few other bookstores, and the crisis was averted.

Then there is the matter that I mentioned above, tailoring the list to reflect the prejudices of the list’s publisher. The Bookseller out of the UK has decided to run its own bestseller list, and is very clear about the criteria it will be using. You’ll note upon close reading that most of these criteria are designed to keep the indie published books off the list.

I’ve written about this sort of thing off and on for years, but it still doesn’t quite scrub that dream-hook for me.

Although I’m making progress, thanks to two things that happened in July.

The first was the Storybundle that I participated in along with Kevin J. Anderson, Michael A. Stackpole, Frank Herbert’s estate, Mike Resnick, Gregory Benford, B.V. Larson, David Farland, and Lightspeed Magazine. We sold enough copies in the first week of July to hit the New York Times list, if the Times counted things like the Bundle.

Which it does not.

Our bundle sold a lot less than the Humble Bundle running concurrently with books by Peter S. Beagle, Cory Doctorow, Neil Gaiman, Lois McMaster Bujold, Robert Charles Wilson, and Cherie Priest. (Both bundles had a time limit and are no longer available.) The Times has counted omnibus/anthology editions in the past, but wouldn’t count these bundles because they’re not sold through approved sites/sources.

These two bundles alone counted for tens of thousands of book sales in July—book sales that the venerable Times considers unimportant.

Okay, I get that. I’ve gotten that for years. I understand the Times’ snobbery and the impossibility of counting everything.

But here’s the thing that really dinged my Times dream. My contribution to the Storybundle was the first novel in my Retrieval Artist series, The Disappeared. Here’s some stats.

•Roc, the original publisher of The Disappeared, took the book out of print one year after the book’s initial publication, even though the book was the first in a series. Until 2012, it was impossible to get all of the books in the series at the same time.

• The Disappeared made no lists in its first printing, and each time a new book in the series appeared, the previous book was not available, so the new book could not goose sales of the old book.

•When WMG started reissuing the Retrieval Artist novels, each novel goosed the sales of the others. Within its first year, The Disappeared sold about 10 percent of its original sales—without a paperback edition (at the time) and without any push.

•The Storybundle sold 25% of the book’s original sales in a month, and as I said, would have made the Times list.

•Many of those sales were not in the States.

•I am now watching a small group of sales work through the other books in the series. These sales are scattered over different formats—ebooks and paper books—as well as in different countries. There’s a lovely halo effect. (None of this counts audio sales. I’m not privy to those numbers at the moment [although I will be in a month or so], so I don’t know if they were goosed as well.)

But here’s the thing: none of these new sales would be counted as a unit by any list makers. The sales are spread over different platforms around the world. So even if sales from different ebook platforms were counted together, for example, they’d still be counted per country, with some sales in the UK, some in Germany, some in Japan.

In other words, the Times wouldn’t count those sales because they’re not US sales.

Yet the sales were in English and actually have velocity.

Those few facts combined with one other thing, which I’ll mention below, finally got it through my thick skull that measurements like the New York Times list are meaningless in 2013. My dream dates from the 1970s. It was a very, very, very different world then.

What matters now is readership, and that’s become harder and harder to measure, except with something that an author can now keep to herself, just like Amazon does: I can see actual sales and count those sales without going through some publisher’s weird-ass algorithm every six months. I don’t have to worry about incorrect reporting or reserves against returns.

I’m seeing real sales in real time.

This evening, as I wrote this blog, my latest novel Snipers hit #88 on the Amazon Kindle time travel bestseller list. I thank all of the readers who’ve bought the book quickly. (Thank you!!!) But I’m not putting that ranking in my marketing, nor am I putting it in my bibliography or mentioning it anywhere but here.

Because I honestly don’t know what it means. Yeah, the book is in the top 100 time travel books being sold on Amazon in the United States this last day of July, 2013 at a particularly late hour in the evening. But you readers might check the listing at 3 a.m. or look at it at 6 p.m. on August first and see something else entirely.

I’m on a bestseller list, kinda sorta, but I have no idea if that’ll last or if it matters to readers.

I know that if a reader scrolls through the time travel list in search of a time travel book in the next hour, and somehow manages to make it all the way through 100 titles, they might see and buy mine.

And that’s all I know.

It’s a good reminder that bestseller lists are just another way to inform readers that books exist.

But…and here’s the thing for me, as a reader and a consumer: Back in the same time period when I imprinted on the Times bestseller list, I listened to the Billboard top 100 every weekend. Back then, rock songs mixed with country and occasionally some American popular song (like Sinatra). I heard a variety of music, and thought the list informative.

Somewhere in the 1990s, the Billboard list had bifurcated so many times that I felt confused when I heard some DJ play from the “adult contemporary” list. I had no idea what that even was. I still don’t, really. And now there are as many music “bestseller” lists as there are book lists. I rarely pay attention any more.

It’s like award season in Hollywood. I can’t keep track of Golden Globes and Director’s Guild and Screen Actor’s Guild and Emmy’s and Oscars, and—oh, who the hell cares?

Now, as a consumer, I have to find other measures of “quality” and/or popularity. I haven’t found them yet, but I’m searching.

Just like you probably are.

And I’m also creating my own lists, thanks to algorithms on various websites from Amazon to Kobo to Goodreads. I find what interests me at the expense of the gatekeepers and tastemakers. I’m reading more, and I’m reading more eclectic things.

Just like I’m watching more eclectic things. When I run out of TV programs to stream, I ask like-minded folks on Facebook what they’re watching. I get great recommendations that way.

I’m not alone in finding TV through social media. I know that folks are finding books that way too. Because smart writers now find ways to put their backlist into print and to keep their frontlist in print, word of mouth has become a potent force again.

More potent than a rigged bestseller list.

Now, if I could only convince my subconscious of that, I loosen the hold of those ancient, no-longer-applicable dreams.

It’s hard though. I know it, and I know some of you have experienced it as well. It’s strange to be in this new world with new rules. And every now and then, the new rules bump up against the way things were once upon a time. And that’s just plain confusing.

For writers—and their long-held dreams.

One dream I never had was that I would write a weekly blog on publishing. Probably because no one had heard of blogging when I was a kid and no one published anything weekly outside of big national journals like Publishers Weekly, which I didn’t read way back when.

So I am constantly astonished by the visitors, reactions, comments, and arguments started by this blog. I’m also startled at how quickly a week can pass. Every now and then, the deadline sneaks up on me, like it did this week, as I’m trying to finish a novella.

Unlike the novella, this blog must fund itself every week. I haven’t mentioned the donate button in the last few weeks, although several of you found it. But when I do mention it, even more of you find it.

So please, if you learned something or you’re a weekly visitor who finds this appointment-blogging, encourage me to continue by leaving a tip on the way out.

Thanks so much!

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The Business Rusch: Bestseller Lists and Other Thoughts

Kristine Kathryn Rusch — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 06:52:05 +0000

The Business Rusch: Bestseller Lists and Other Thoughts

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

On Tuesday, in my morning business reading, I came across a rather startling statistic: the claim that it only took 20,000 sales of paper books to hit the paper bestseller lists. I’m also assuming the statistic means paper; it might mean that it takes 20K to hit any bestseller list, which is still shockingly low, if you think about it.

Now, I have no way to verify this statistic. It comes from a deliberately anonymous source in the middle of a PandoDaily article on the future of publishing. However, reading the entire post makes me think that Anonymous here truly is in publishing and truly does know of what he/she speaks.

It also confirms a sense I’ve been having for a while, but have only a handful of statistics for. My sense is this: because the book market has expanded so greatly, it takes fewer copies of one book to hit a bestseller list—any bestseller list.

Let’s talk mass market paperback first. When I sold my first novel into science fiction and fantasy, the novel shipped at 30,000 mass market copies—decent for a first novel in a genre that was considered the lowest of the low, but nowhere near what the bestsellers in the sf/f genre were selling. (Not the bestsellers period, but the names you’d recognize from the time—the folks at the top of the sf/f list.)

I don’t know what their hardcover numbers were, but their mass market numbers (from now on, I’m going to call mass market by its industry acronym: mmpb) were anywhere from 50,000 to 100,000 shipped. In sf/f, the lowest selling genre (at the time) besides Western.

When my first romance novel under the pen name Kristine Grayson came out in 2000, the publisher shipped 35,000 mmpb copies, which was a middling to low shipment of a romance novel at the time. Romance novels from standard midlisters—not the top of the line books—shipped at 50,000 or higher.

So when I saw mmpb books hitting the New York Times mass market list or the Publishers Weekly mass market list—and I knew for a fact those books have a print run of 20,000, I got nervous. I questioned my own knowledge of the books. I figured that particular book was a successful outlier and shrugged it off—until I saw Anonymous’s number.

Now let me say for the record that not all books that sell 20,000 copies will make a bestseller list, nor will all books that sell 50,000 copies. It depends on the day and the time of year. It depends on the competition for that list. And it depends on who is reporting.

Hitting a bestseller list has more to do with velocity than it does total sales. Velocity is the number of books sold within a short period of time, which for paper books, is one week. (Amazon measures by the hour.) So if you sell 20,000 copies in one week and never sell another copy, you might make a bestseller list. But if you sell 20,000 copies slowly—1,000 copies every week for 20 weeks—you won’t make a list at all, even if the book continues to sell at that rate for the next twenty weeks. In other words, the second book will outsell the first by a factor of 2, but the first book’s author will be able to “bestseller” on the cover of her next book and you won’t.

Got that? Because it’s important to this discussion.

In about a month, Publishers Weekly will print its report of the bestselling titles of 2011, and it should include numbers. We’ll see how those numbers compare to, say, 2008 or some other year. Because I’m expecting the numbers in all formats except e-book to be down.

The numbers in mass market paperback will be dramatically down, because mmpb have lost most of their slots. (A slot is the place where a retailer put a book.) Borders is gone and Barnes & Noble has cut back shelf space. (I have no idea if the rush back into books at the end of the year has continued at B&N or abated.) The loss of independent bookstores is less important here because most indies didn’t carry a lot of mmpbs.

But Safeway, Albertsons, and other grocery stories did. As did WalMart, and other box retailers, truck stops, convenience stores, and airport bookstores. Most of those places have either cut back on mmpb dramatically or stopped carrying them altogether.

Some of this is price point. Traditional publishers realized a few years ago that mmpbs were becoming very costly. So publishers bumped up the price of a mmpb to nearly $10. With trade papers hovering around $15, it made more sense to publish more books in trade, which had a higher profit margin for the company. (Trade royalties are often lower, a remnant of the “odd” format thinking of the late 1990s. Plus many trades are sold non-returnable.)

With publishers moving a lot of the bestsellers to trade (when they normally would be mmpb), the retailers realized they needed trade shelves to accommodate the trade bestsellers. And book sales went down. Mass market readers want a cheap book, not a $15 book, so they either went to the library, or trolled the used bookstore for the same book. When retailers like Safeway looked at the book sections of the store, they saw a significant decline in overall revenue in the past few years. So the retailers did what any good retailer does—they reduced the size of the section commensurate with the interest in that section. No sense wasting space on something that doesn’t sell as well as it used to.

A book that would have shipped at 30,000 copies twelve years ago now ships for 5,000 copies today. Not because there’s less interest in that type of book, but because there are fewer places to buy the book. You can’t sell a book that isn’t on a rack, virtual or real. If the book isn’t on a real rack, then you miss the impulse buyers, the folks who stopped in for eggs and leave with a copy of the latest mmpb thriller by some writer they’ve never heard of, which they picked up because of its nifty cover.

If there are fewer books available, then it takes fewer copies to hit that magic velocity number which puts your book in the top ten or top fifteen sellers for the week. Books hit bestseller lists in comparison to other books published around the same time. So if mmpbs sell ¼ of what they sold ten years ago, then it will take ¼ of the copies than it took ten years ago to hit a bestseller list.

What does all this mean? Well, that’s the question, isn’t it. Bestseller lists have proliferated in the past two decades. When my first novel was published, there were four bestseller lists—hardcover fiction, hardcover nonfiction, paperback fiction and paperback nonfiction. Only a handful of places even published bestseller lists—The New York Times, of course, and Publisher’s Weekly (whose list, according to Michael Korda, is older than the Times’ list). The Wall Street Journal had a hardcover list, and USA Today’s list started around that point, combining every title into one—then considered a revolutionary concept, when really, it was an old-fashioned concept, the way things used to be.

Now, most (surviving) newspapers have bestseller lists. There are paid bestseller lists in chain bookstores. (I, as a publisher, can buy the number one slot for my favorite book for a certain amount of money. That puts my favorite book in the point-of-purchase part of the store; it’s advertising.) Amazon has bestseller lists galore, and so does B&N online.

A new list came into being a decade ago, courtesy of J.K. Rowling. The New York Times got irritated that the top slots on the hardcover, trade, and mass market bestseller lists were filled with that fantasy children’s junk, so they spun off the new “children’s” list, to take that nasty series out of their prestigious hardcover list to make room for “real” novels.

The Times tinkers all the time (pun intended) with the list. It added a trade bestseller list in 2007 to split trades out from other paperback books (those nasty mass market books that the Times didn’t want to review), and then the Times added an e-book bestseller list last year.

Amazon does the same thing. It delineates its list by genre, subgenre, and sub-subgenre. You can be an e-book bestseller for fiction or for romance fiction or for romance/contemporary fiction or for romance/contemporary/paranormal or for romance/contemporary/nosex/noswearwords/nokissing/catsanddogslivingtogether or whatever other combination the algorithm comes up with this week.

All of this makes for more and more bestselling book titles, and at the same time, it dilutes the value of having “bestseller” by your name. Not that the bestseller lists were ever a totally honest reflection of the state of sales within the book publishing world. The New York Times only uses “select” bookstores and keeps the names of those stores secret, with some “weighted” heavier than others, and they have done so from the beginning.

It was quite shocking, then, when USA Today started publishing their list based on raw sales data. When that happened, it became clear that the Times list didn’t reflect any sales reality.

But lists could always be goosed. Exorcist author William Peter Blatty sued the Times over inaccuracies in the list back in 1983. Authors tried to manipulate the list all the time by finding out what those Times stores were and buying 1,000 copies of their own books from each. Sometimes it actually worked.

Authors are doing the same thing now with the Kindle lists, trying to get their books up the list with a combination of free promotions and convincing their readers/fans to buy books at a certain time. For the sake of both Amazon’s list and the USA Today list, it’s better to have fans of a series preorder the next book so that the book ships on publication day, than it is to have them buy the book one week or five weeks after publication. The preorders goose the lists.

At a certain point, all of this list goosing and bestseller discussion becomes moot. It’s like grade inflation in school. If no one gets lower than a C, what’s an A worth? If everyone can be a bestseller, even if it’s just in one bookstore in the sub-sub-sub-subgenre list: romance/contemporary/nosex/noswearwords/nokissing/catsanddogslivingtogether, then what does the phrase “bestselling book” mean?

This is a question that Billboard is dealing with right now. For those of you who are musically challenged, the Billboard charts have been around since 1936. Back then, of course, there were fewer charts (country and my hit parade, I believe), and the charts were compiled by hand by member radio stations (who often got payola from record studios, and who would remove bestselling titles from their lists when the studios stopped paying). Anyway, the Billboard charts, like the bestseller list, only had a few subcategories way back when. I’m not even sure if the country charts differed from the pop charts back at the beginning.

Why am I telling you this? Remember that the music industry is ahead of the book industry on this change to digital. And the struggles the music industry has will come up in the struggles the print industry has.

So what’s happening with Billboard these days is this: Billboard is tweaking its list again because of—wait for it—free downloads and 99-cent album promotions. Billboard decided—as of last week—that any album sold for less than $3.49 does not count as an album sale. (The price point is not a random number; it’s about half of a retail price of most albums.)

By that standard, Lady Gaga’s chart topper Born This Way did not sell 1.1 million copies after its release last June. It only sold 660,000 copies. That would have meant that she did not have a million-copy debut. It would have meant that no album had a million-copy debut in 2011.

This policy will only be in place in the first month of the album’s release. After that, the 99-cent sale will count.

What’s Billboard trying to do? Prevent a lower-priced (and, by implication, less worthy) album from goosing the list. In an editorial, Executive Editor Bill Werde, wrote “Billboard doesn’t want to control the marketplace. We just want to count it. But free or almost-free albums don’t represent a marketplace.”

(Note: I found this link in the LA Times. I was unable to find to find the original editorial on Billboard’s rather chaotic website without more digging than I was willing to do.)

He then adds that it’s probably “smart business” to get music to as many people as possible to “hook them on your songs,” which makes “the music a marketing tool. That’s fine, but let’s not call that an album sale.”

While Lady Gaga’s manager is angry about the shift, Jeremy DeVine of Temporary Residence Limited, a company that handles indie rock groups, said, “The sales are great for consumers and the artists, but from a chart perspective it treats a $10 album and a $1 album with equal legitimacy, which is dubious. You end up with albums by Animal Collective and Explosions in the Sky rubbing elbows with Katy Perry and Kanye West, if only for a couple of weeks before it swiftly slides off the charts. These kinds of quick sales paints unrealistic pictures of success for everyone involved.”

Or to put it Werde’s way, he has to make sure he’s “creating strong, credible charts.”

The Times has used similar arguments. When it decided to add the children’s list (just before the release of a Harry Potter book), Times editor Charles McGrath said, “We are also making room on the adult list for adult titles—not that what has replaced the Potter is exactly illustrious.”

What replaced the Potter title were romances by Danielle Steele and Catherine Coulter, which the Times clearly didn’t like either. Nor did the Times like it last year when it was forced to add Amanda Hocking’s indie-published titles to its new e-book bestseller list.

To the people who produce the lists, it’s all about the lists’s integrity. And I do understand that. Everyone who is managing a bestseller list right now—be it in publishing or the music industry or even in television—is about my age, fifty or so. We can all remember growing up with the book to read, the album at the top of the charts, the number one television show. If you had the #1 television show, millions and millions of people watched. If you had the #1 album, you sold millions and millions of copies, not just 1.1 million or 660,000, depending on how you wanted to count it. If you had the #1 novel—well, first of all, it was hardcover, and secondly, it sold millions of copies too. It was on every coffee table of every literate household in the nation, whether that household read the book or not.

We forty- and fifty-somethings remember when lists could have that kind of influence. We remember buying books because they were #1 on the Times, not because they were to our tastes.

The days of that kind of influence are gone.

Sure, some books will sell at astronomical numbers. This year, it’s George R.R. Martin (and personally, I love that, both as a fantasy fiction fan and someone who has known George for years). Last year, it was Stieg Larsson. Before that, it was J.K. Rowling, or maybe it was Dan Brown. I lose track.

But for the most part, the number of copies a bestselling title—and by that I mean a title that’s in the top ten of the Times list or the top 25 of the USA Today list—are way way down. You can see that reflected in the advances. Many, many bestsellers are being asked to take half or less when they sign a contract for a new book.

That’s what made me think Anonymous from PandoDaily is for real. In the middle of Anonymous’s anti-Amazon rant (which is what his (her?) post is really about) is this: “But in recent years, as book sales have declined, the advances for the biggest books have gone down proportionally, too. What used to be a $1 million book is now a $400,000 book. Publishers are thinking ‘OK, we’ll move less copies, but we’ll pay less for them so we’ll survive.’”

And that is how publishers are thinking. They’re running scared. Anonymous’s entire rant against Amazon is one big fearful shout into the darkness. Toward the end of his rant, he actually acknowledges something important. He writes that Amazon is trying to be “the only place where you buy books, but [also] the only place that publishes books too….Funny thing is that it’s actually better for authors.”

It’s actually better for authors to get rid of traditional publishing. He’s not alone in saying that. A quite shocking article (to me) by Faber chief executive Stephen Page appeared in The Guardian last week. (Read this essay. It’s a bit of sanity from traditional publishing, at a time when most traditional publishing execs aren’t sane.)

Page wrote, “In my view, while 2011 may have signaled the beginning of the end of the era of publishers-with-access-to-the-mass-market as the dominant model for book publishing, it did not signal an end to the opportunity presented by writing or publishing more generally.”

However, he says, in order to survive, traditional publishers have to start bringing value to the writer and to the consumer (the reader), rather than to “the book trade.” And that’s at the heart of all this fear.

Traditional publishers and the auxiliary businesses that have formed around them, from agents to bestseller lists, have focused on the book trade—focused on selling to bookstores and to wholesalers. Now the consumer can go directly to the author if either wants and cut out “the book trade” altogether. (I can sell books off my blog, if I want to, bypassing everyone from a publisher to Amazon.)

This change is unbelievably huge, and it makes us all leery, especially those of us who’ve been around for a long time. We’re searching in the dark for a handhold because we’ve never ever looked at a world without “the book trade.” We don’t know how to proceed.

That’s what’s behind the bifurcation of the bestseller lists. The lists are there to give legitimacy to certain titles among “the book trade,” but it’s getting harder and harder to do that. Billboard is acknowledging that when it tries to distinguish between an album bought for ten dollars and an album bought for a dollar (which has to be marketing, ignoring all of us who would have bought the album for $10 and were happy to discover it was $9 cheaper than we expected).

Some old systems don’t really work any more. Is it legitimate to call someone who was #1 on Amazon’s Kindle Free list for one hour a bestseller? I don’t know. And I write that as someone who was in the top ten of the Kindle free list for days last October. I’ve also had books on the Times extended list in the 1990s—before anyone thought to count the five below the top ten as important. I’ve had bestsellers in paper all over the world, and here in the States. But I’ve never had a #1 New York Times, and of course, like any writer, I would love one.

But, with the very important exceptions of the writers who are on the Times top ten for weeks and weeks, the folks who slid onto the list and then off aren’t making as much money as they used to. If Anonymous is right (and I think he is based on those royalty statements I saw from other bestsellers), then 20,000 copies does a bestseller make (in the right week, with the right competition). That means that the author is making significantly less than he would have as a bestseller fifteen years ago.

Of course, he wouldn’t have been a bestseller fifteen years ago. Or would he? Would that same book have sold 80,000 mass market copies in the first week of release back then?

The book certainly had a greater chance of doing so. There were thousands if not hundreds of thousands more slots to stick those mass market books into back then.

And even if the book didn’t hit the lists at 80,000 sales, the author would have made a lot more money on that mass market than he’ll make today.

So, here’s the rub, the real question that I found myself asking this morning after I read Anonymous’s rant.

If a writer is going into traditional publishing to have a shot at the New York Times bestseller list, is that shot worth the loss of income? Is it worth the risk of going out of print (paper) in a year or so with no ability to get those rights back because of a perpetual ebook publication?

If the bestseller list means millions of copies and millions of dollars, then the risk might be worthwhile. But if books are getting on respected lists like the Times with only 20,000 copies sold, then that changes the equation, in my opinion.

Because that same writer could sell 20,000 ebooks 500 copies at a time over 3.3 years (40 months), and continue to earn without hitting a list at all. And make more money—70% of the cover price instead of 8% of cover for the mass market edition.

Is that 20K number unrealistic? No. Look at this screen capture that Joe Konrath posted on his blog. Ignore that 11,000 sales of one title that he managed in one month and look at the sales of the other titles. There are writers and titles selling much better than his on a monthly basis. These numbers aren’t because Konrath is “famous” (see his argument about this). These numbers came about because people found the books and are reading them. These numbers are because the books are available.

Some would argue that bestseller lists on Amazon and in other places have advertising value, and I would agree with that. Readers do look at the lists when they’re not certain what to buy.

But again, is that minimal and momentary advertising value worth the longterm loss of income and the longterm loss of use of the copyright? I don’t think so. There are other ways to bring your book to the attention of readers. (See my piece on promotion for that.)

This tradeoff, this loss of revenue, in order to become a bestseller might be a purchase of something with historical value, not current value.

Most of us—beginning and established writers, traditional publishers, agents, booksellers—are working off old models, the models we grew up with, and we’re not questioning if those models still have value.

Once upon a time, you had to sell hundreds of thousands of copies to hit a bestseller list. Now you don’t. So, in my opinion, the bestseller list has less value than it had ten years ago.

We’re operating in an old paradigm. And it makes me sad, honestly. Because old goals die hard. I’ll still be ecstatic if something of mine hits the Times list. I’m going to be thrilled if something of mine is #1 on the Kindle paid e-book list.

But I’m not going to trade long-term revenue to achieve those goals. When a traditional publisher tells me, like one did today, that he can get me on a bestseller list and that’s one reason to sell a book to his company, I will agree with him. He might be right. But he might only be selling 20,000 copies of my book to get me on that list.

And that’s very different from the way it was when I came into the business.

We all have to remember that as we choose how to publish our books. What was important when we started might not be important now—no matter how much we want it to be.

Fifteen years ago, if you told me I would blog every week, I would have laughed at you. If you told me I would do so with a donate-button on my site, asking readers to finance the essay, I would have rolled my eyes. Things have changed dramatically. I’ve been doing this blog in one form or another for nearly three years now, and you readers have funded it. I said then, like I’m saying now, I’ll continue doing this as long as you continue to support it.

Thanks for the support, the discussion, the links, and the funding. I appreciate it.

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Billboard – Kristine Kathryn Rusch

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The Business Rusch: Bestseller Lists and Other Thoughts