So how's your decade been?

by M. L. Buchman

Yep, we humans like our round numbers and there's another tenner coming up in just a few days. So, I thought I'd take a moment and look backwards so that I could try to peer forwards.

• 2007 - the first Amazon Kindle came out (about the kajillionth entry into the e-reader market and not the best of them). The main thing that set it apart is that it was backed up by a direct publishing platform (KDP) and a wireless delivery system.
• 2009 - I dropped my first couple KDP books.
• 2011 - "The Kindle Christmas" This was the year when suddenly the Kindle was THE gift under the green boughs. (That would be the Kindle 4, the one after the one that I bought with the clicky keyboard.)
• 2015 - Hugh Howey and Data Guy set out to discover the scale of this new-fangled indie pub industry...and discover that it is over 30% of total e-book unit sales and about 15% of total e-book revenue. (This was the tail end of the $0.99 discounting madness that we still haven't fully recovered from.)
• 2018 - By their last report, the numbers were more like 40% of unit sales and 25% of income--that's of the entire publishing industry! Poke into fiction and most genres are over 75% of unit sales.

So, let's look at this for moment.

In 2009, a small group of friends and I were very early adopters of the indie publishing realm that would reshape publishing in ways that hadn't happened since the pocket-sized paperbacks of the early 1940s, the collapse of the pulps in the late 1950s, and the distribution collapse at the turn of the century. (Remember when your grocery store had big racks labeled: "Local author"? Then Safeway said, "No, we just want to order in a few places, not 400 local distributors." Chain stores jumped on the bandwagon and suddenly every store complied with New York-mandated stocking levels rather than manager or regional preferences.)

But all that aside, I'm trying to go back to our 2009 / 2010 excitement and see how I felt about the next decade. I knew the money was there, but I knew that without an audience, I didn't stand a chance.

Thankfully, 2010 was also the year that the 440 rejections I'd earned over the 1990s (roughly a submission every 8 days for 10 straight years) finally paid off. My publisher, with their (back then) vastly superior distribution system helped my work find an audience. I spent those 13 titles on a traditional publisher from 2012-2016 knowing full well that I'd be making a tenth as much per book sale. I figured that was worth it to find an audience.

Turns out that it was. Laid off late in the recession for the second time in three years, 2013 was the year I made the jump to being a full-time writer.

How? I wrote my ass off. As did so many others.

Now lets peek for just a moment at the fads.

• The $0.99 discounters. Made some money (and a LOT of sales), but they're gone now.
• The madly fast-releasing single authors (any heard from Amanda Hocking lately? Certainly not the way we used to).
• We won't mention the KU scammers (Round 1, 2, or 3)
• The fad chasers (most are in it for a few years then gone).
• Now we have the 20 to 50k folks chasing the hot markets with vast quantities of fast-written work. The few really successful ones have mostly created ghost author publishing collectives, some big enough to generate almost daily sales.

Then there were the career builders, in it for the long haul. That absolutely included me. My desire to go back into the corporate maelstrom is so low that I'd rather live on an Ecuadoran beach...and I don't want to live in Ecuador.

So, what sustained my friends and I through the 2010s? A lot of it was writing good story and releasing steadily.

But that's no longer enough.

By 2017-18 discoverability wasn't just a challenge, it was becoming downright hard! Even the mega-sellers who used to drop 5-10 million copies of a title are now thrilled if they can break 1M. (Their New York advances are plummeting to match.)

Why?

There is so much more choice. In 2007 (the year Kindle launched), there were approximately 43,000 fiction titles published in the US. It's now over a quarter million.

OOPS! It's over a quarter of a million if you only count the books published with ISBNs. Extrapolating from the Data Guy reports, we know that the number of fiction titles published in 2019 is probably at least twice that, maybe 3x. No e-publisher requires an ISBN.

Changing from 43,000 to 1/2-million (3/4M) new titles. Yep! That's some kinda growth. The good news is, more people are reading than ever because it is cheap, convenient, and any particular subgenre they favor is now published (rather than New York curating it out of existence).

2020 and Beyond

Is that slowing down? Dream on. More people with ideas. More first-time authors finding the urge to complete a book.

And finding newer and better tools to complete those ideas:

• Plot builders
• Dictation
• Grammar fixers (Grammarly is just the beginning on that.)
• Vellum may seem like the be-all of formatting and book layout right now, but it will get easier. (Pre-load your metadata and passwords into the file and it will auto-pub for you to the sites of your choice? That's practically what D2D is already doing for you.)
• Anyone tried building a book cover in Bookbrush yet? They're very, very close to being a point-and-click Photoshop killer. They're hoping to pull that off within the next year, btw.

And let's look further ahead:

• By the end of 2020 (maybe mid-2021), the massive price threshold on translations is going to crack. Instead of human translation, we're going to have AI translation in seconds followed up by a week of work for a clean-up editor. We're talking about idiomatic translation, not simple literal translation. Not so fanciful. If I had a spare ten grand lying about, I could have this up and running within a week...now! The tools are here, they'll just be common and significantly more mature by end of year. Right now, you need a really good cleanup editor and a proofreader (but that's a book in 2 weeks rather than 3-6 months). Within a year to 18 months, a proofreader should do. I know several people who've already switched over to AI-assisted translation. At present, the cleanup editor is still a critical role.
• Oh yeah, by later in the decade, translation probably won't be an issue at all. I'll publish an English-language book. On your Kindle 2030 you just select the language you want to read it in and idiomatic translation (or close enough for 99% of folks) will show up on the screen. The translator will download just as easily as the Google Translate dictionaries now pop onto your phone. Think of all the new readers you can find for your older work then!
• Auto-generation of new books that match the style of an author's written works? That's already being debated in copyright circles. If I upload all of Stephen King's works into an AI, then generate a new story in his voice, who owns that? Me, Stephen, or the AI? Seriously, the 2020s are going to have copyright issues that make the 2010s and ebook rights look timid. This will definitely be in the courts by 2025. And probably running reasonably well by end of decade at the latest. Clean up the auto-gen and publish.
• You can already create a perfectly acceptable audiobook with a digital voice in minutes. I was a beta-tester on one over a year ago and they've come a long way since. Emotions will be harder (2022?) and real dynamic expression (2025?). For now? Consider doing two: a cheap read-by-machine and a spendier read-by-human version. Great for the 2x listening speed crowd anyway. (I'm not there yet, but I'm definitely looking into it.) Did I mention that you can do this right now at https://www.descript.com/lyrebird-ai for $10/month. Think of the $2.99 "Machine read" version...except you can teach the machine your voice. It will be a flat but acceptable reading. I'd price a novel something like this: $2.99 machine-generated audio in my voice, $4.99-6.99 e-novel, $9.99-12.99 human-narrated audiobook, print at whatever price matches the pages. Here now!, not 2025.
• Will we see auto-export of scripts into film with realistic electronic characters by the end of the decade and point-and-click stage direction? Maybe... You think that one's crazy? Did you see all of the characters that Disney brought back from the dead in Star Wars? Consider what effectively turned days of QuarkXpress layout into minutes of Vellum over the last decade. 
• Oh, and did I mention that several of the Big 5 publishers are going down. A couple will be swept up by media giants seeking massive libraries of previously contracted content. (Oh, wait, Viacom/CBS already owns Simon and Schuster). Big 4. One may just collapse (and won't that be a mess). Perhaps one will shatter into a number of medium-size pubs or just shrink until they are one? I'm betting on a Chinese billionaire buying one just to get his money out of China.

So, a wild ride is coming. But that's not the whole picture.

A friend observed, "Cultural changes take decades no matter what cool tech arises."

People have been seeking story for millennia. They've been reading books for centuries. Yes, audiobooks are on the rise in our busy society, but the vast majority of readers are still readers and will continue to seek story. The format we're consumed in may change, but the world still needs storytellers.

So, while I'm seeking to position myself for the future (a third of my novels are already in audio with more every month, and I'm hoping to get into translations in 2020), technology isn't my guide for the 2020s.

My watchword for the 2020s is "Discoverability." That's what I test all new non-writing ideas against. This kind of ad. That kind of interview. This new tool.

Will it increase my discoverability? If yes, I pursue it. Unsure? I may test it. Not so much? I don't bother.

I think that writers who consciously ask that question, will have the greatest success no matter what changes are headed our way.

M.L. "Matt" Buchman has 60+ thriller and romance novels, 100 short stories, and lotsa audiobooks. Booklist says: 3x “Top-10 Romance of the Year” and among “The 20 Best Romantic Suspense Novels: Modern Masterpieces.” NPR and B&N say “Best 5 Romance of the Year.” A project manager with a geophysics degree, he’s designed and built houses, flown and jumped out of planes, solo-sailed a 50’ sailboat, and bicycled solo around the world…and he quilts. More at: www.mlbuchman.com.

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.