Why anyone can succed at publishing, or why publishing is failing

Just an abstract scenario, because I don’t want to get anyone (or myself) in trouble:

Publisher owns print rights to backlist title. Publisher does not promote said title, resting on the title either selling well on its own or rotting. Publisher has first dibs at electronic rights, fumbles them with a bad offer. Other publisher secures e-rights by offering a competitive deal. New publisher promotes same backlist title, blows it out of the water. Promoting ebook leads to collateral sales of pbook; also gets mentioned in industry news as a huge success. First publisher gets upset about accidentally succeeding, even to a minimal degree, calls the agent that represents the title, and complains about how first publisher didn’t get the ebook rights.

Yes, this really happened, like right just now, today.

Hint, first publisher: YOU DIDN’T GET THE EBOOK RIGHTS BECAUSE YOU WEREN’T PROMOTING THE TITLE AND DIDN’T OFFER FAIR ROYALTIES. Now quit harassing other people for your bad business practices and get back to work, such as it is.

Also, as a note, the phone call from the agency at your bequest to ask why their title was doing noteworthily well led to new business for us. So thanks, I guess.

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On all sides, publishers are uncompetitive. They offer bad deals to their producers, pay too much for the internal services they offer to secure those producers, and then can’t figure out how to make peace with their retailers, any retailer. Only one of these facts has been in the news for the last few years, but make no mistake, all three are true.

These facts are the exact crazy-person reasons that makes me think anyone with the slightest business sense can get ahead in this industry, and also, why publishing is going down the shitter.

Amazon.com: Tags Customers Associate with This Product

The “tags” that appear on Amazon product pages are user-generated tags and can be as helpful or spiteful as any user comment. Publishers and individual authors have no control over what tags customers associate with any given product.

The best practice one can do, if one is so inclined, is to navigate to the “Tags Customers Associate with This Product” section of the page and select ONLY the tags that are true or beneficial. This will weigh the selected tags heavier against the malicious tags.

To be frank, if this were going to have any significant impact one way or another, it would require thousands of selections instead of ones or dozens, and recommending this course of action to your authors would probably help them to feel more in control but otherwise waste their time. In fact, the most memorable use of this feature was to flag books as “DRMd” or “DRM-free” to help tech-savvy customers make purchases that reflect their ethical values. People do still flag products this way, but I haven’t known a massive push on this front for years. This makes me feel relatively certain that the impact of user-generated tags on search functionality and product discoverability is minimal.

These user-generated tags are in no way related to the tags publishers associate with their products at submission, which will always play the primary role in search functionality and product discovery. It is likely that your publisher has either good or good enough practices in place for their own distributions, but you may always query your editor about what metadata they’re associating with your book. Like most decisions, however, I would not recommend using your marketing instincts to try any correct their decisions; instead, consult with someone who knows about SEO before reacting to your publisher’s information. Being informed instead of reactive will help everyone involved.