What Isn't New in Publishing?

by M. L. Buchman

This month Romancing the Genres blog is running a special series on "What's New in Publishing?" It would be far easier to answer what isn't new, because change is happening so fast. So, first, what is changing?

AUDIO
Audio books have been very quietly growing the way e-books did in the early years, expanding by double-digit percentages year over year. As they used to say of e-books, a 150% of nothing is still nothing. Now, meeting someone who hasn't read an e-book is the exception. Someone who is a dedicated e-book reader is no longer a curiosity.

Audio is right at that threshold. The market is in the process of blowing open this year and next. Look to consume audio at a rate (and an accessible price point) that you never imagined. I have over 20 titles in audio now and I'm adding to that as fast as I can. http://www.mlbuchman.com/audio/

One of the hottest new bits here? Price control. Authors can now discount their audio for a sale, offer a title First in Series free, and anything else they might have done with an e-book. It's an incredible change!

DISTRIBUTION
E-books are dying! (They aren't.) Print is back! (It is.) Readers are disappearing! (The publishing industry, if you include the indies, is expanding strongly.)

Almost everything you hear that is broken is because it has moved in some new way and no one knows how to track it. If I sell a book off my website (which I'll be doing starting in 2019), no tool in the entire industry will see that sale (except the tax people, of course).

Where we used to have Amazon, B&N, Kobo, and iTunes, we now have hundreds of distributors. I have titles that sell in over 50 countries. A decade ago selling in 3 countries was a triumph. The access to readers is simply astonishing--or rather, the readers' access to us.

SUBSCRIPTIONS
Starting January 1st, you'll be able to subscribe to my short stories and novels. If you never want to miss one, you won't have to anymore. I have a friend who runs a monthly magazine...all of his own fiction. Subscriptions are old, they've been around since before America included the United States.

BRAND
Indie publishing has allowed huge access to readers by writers. Prior to this era (since Christmas 2011, often called the "Kindle Christmas" for the year that the Kindle e-reader went mainstream), a year with 70,000 new titles was significant. Now we're somewhere around 1,000,000 new titles. Yes, a lot of this just disappears, but a lot of it doesn't. There are new genres (every day it seems). There are new ideas (every second it seems--actually every 31 seconds as there are 31M seconds in a year, but that's just being fussy, I don't even know why I mention it).

How can an author stand out? By creating a strong brand. Stephen King, Janet Evanovich, Nora Roberts, Lawrence Block, etc. are fantastically strong brands. You know what you're going to get when you pick one up. To be a success today, an author needs to start thinking very hard about their brand and how to market it.

OTHERS
There are hundreds of things that are new or changing. Facebook popularity (and hence the effectiveness of its ads) is sliding. Amazon ads are making so much money for Amazon that what you're searching for no longer shows up on the page (I was at a conference recently where it was recommended that you buy ads for your own products so that when somebody searches on you, your products actually show up!) Systems like that simply aren't sustainable. New markets appear every day. Some last, some fade. Some are brilliant, but before their time. Or underfunded. Or are entering to crowded a market place.

You can lose track of what's important chasing all of these trends and changes.

SO WHAT IS IMPORTANT
I think it boils down to two things that never change:
1) Telling good stories
2) Connecting with your readers (whether by publishing the next title or marketing yourself madly, it doesn't matter, you just need to connect).

Without the substance of good stories, all the "new" and "changing" in the world won't help you at all. It's why I always focus on making my next book better than any prior title. I strive to do that every, single time.

ONE LAST ITEM
What's changing next? Well, it's already here in some surprising ways: artificial intelligence.

I won't go into the numerous arguments about what this is and how to define at what point it becomes AI. Let's just say that to translate a book effectively a decade ago was a task for an exceptionally skilled translator that could take 1-2 months. Now, you can run the title through an AI and create a good enough translation that a skilled translator can probably turn it into something good and saleable in a week.

We've known about Natural Voice for a long time. It and its cohorts read books for the blind, answer our support calls, and become more capable every day. They aren't doing emotion yet, but how far away is that.

Over the next 5-10 years it could be one of the biggest changes ever to the publishing industry. Couldn't happen? I was a very early adopter, I published my first e-book on Amazon ten years ago next October.

Can't wait to see what changes this month's great lineup of folks have to say.