InsaneJournal

The Last Word on Bookhabit (Honest)

You know, the more I think about this whole Bookhabit thing the more annoyed with it I get. My opinions on the subject have been slowly growing in the comments of the last post, but I think I’m going to summarise them here, for posterity’s sake.

Non-Transparent Process

As a bureaucrat, this is the one that pisses me off the most. I remember back in between Round 1 and Round 2 I got an email from Claire that very obtusely hinted at the voting system for Round 2 being ‘weighted’ in some way. It wasn’t any more explicit than that, and it never became any more explicit than that; at no time in the last two weeks were any of the authors ever informed about the specifics of the ranking system. In fact — as mentioned to me in the email — Bookhabit was deliberately obfuscating the process in an effort to “prevent gaming of the system”.

Fair enough? Well, no, not really. Because the site essentially changed the rules of the game not half-way through play, but after all the goals had been scored. “Bad” votes weren’t eliminated as the contest progressed, but were deliberately left in right until the end. Why do this?

Misrepresentation

(This goes for the “vote weighting” thing, too.)

Here’s the deal; the system as it progressed was set up to allow people with more dedicated fans to pull a higher rank. The system at the end was set up to specifically disadvantage books that had become popular extraneous to the Bookhabit site.

To me, this is Bookhabit essentially wanting to have its cake and eat it too. It wanted the extra hits and Google traffic bought in by the ‘popular’ authors but it didn’t want any of these actually popular books getting into its Top 10. Why? The official reasons for the vote-changing at the end of the competition hinged on what I suppose you’d call “site users” versus “book fans”. Rankings by “site users” — user that ranked more than one book, signed up before the contest, downloaded more books and so forth — were weighted more than rankings by fans who’d been brought in by individual authors to support their book in particular. More on that in a minute, but…

Do I have a problem with that? Well, no. Not if the site had been flat-out honest about that throughout the competition. But it wasn’t. It was pitching Round 2 as a “popular vote” and so that’s what authors like Random and I treated it like.

You know what the fourth and fifth Google hits for the search term ‘bookhabit’ are? I’ll give you one guess.ⁱ

This is what bothers me. That we put in all this effort with promotion — and yeah, it was effort — and in the end the site essentially turns around and says, “Oh sorry, we didn’t tell you before but that’s not how it works.” Would we have bothered to promote the site as hard as we did if we’d know that to start with? Hell no.

Disrespect to the Fans

This one was originally pointed out by Random but I agree with him wholeheartedly.

Bookhabit disrespected you. Our fans; the people who took time out to show your support for us. Because they downranked your vote. Because you’re apparently not the “right” people for their site. And this pisses me off. This really pisses me off, because as I’ve mentioned before, it’s all about the fans. Fans are everything, our most precious currency. I spend a lot of time trying to interface with the fen — both new and old — because I know you guys are important.

Bookhabit, apparently, doesn’t. And that’s just bad for business.

Time and time again, whenever anyone looks at success in the long tail or micropayments market, it’s constantly shown that success comes from fans. It’s the viral market at its rawest and yeah, it’s about popular appeal. Hell, it’s not just the long tail. Economics works like this. You can be lauded by critics all you like, but you only get to be J.K. Rowling if people like you.ⁱⁱ

This is where I think Bookhabit’s dropped the ball; they’re trying to seem ‘literary’ rather than popular. And seriously, I don’t have a problem with that. I think it’s a crappy business move, but I don’t have a problem with it.

I have a problem with them implying otherwise.

The Cheating Thing

Since I’m talking about fans, I’m going to talk about cheating. And let’s be honest, here; Chainbreaker dropped from 5th place to 24th. That’s a hell of a lot of votes taken out, and there’s nothing about that that doesn’t make us look like we were playing dirty (book) pool.

Were we?

Well, I don’t know. I’ve tried to keep it a bit don’t-ask-don’t-tell but I can say with a (mostly) clear conscienceⁱⁱⁱ that if there was cheating, it didn’t come from any official source.

It came from our fans.

And you know what? That’s fucking awesome! Because that’s exactly the kind of fan we’re looking for; the sort of people who are prepared to go above and beyond the call to support us. It’s a dog-eat-fucking-dog world out there and you don’t win by playing nice. Bookhabit calls it ‘cheating’. I call it “dedication”.

So thank you, whoever you were (no no, don’t tell me; it’s your secret). You fucking rock my world.

A Bad Deal for Authors

Since we’re out of the comp, I guess I can finally say what I’ve been thinking from the start, and it’s up there in the subheading. I’ve given them a run, and at the end of the day, I don’t think Bookhabit is a good deal for aspiring authors sitting in the long tail. I just can’t shake the feeling that they’ve essentially — consciously or not — set themselves up as the modern version of a vanity press.

Vanity press; the thing every aspiring author is warning about. Essentially, you pay a truck load of money up front, get printed copies of your book and then it’s up to you, the author, to sell it. Vanity press is expensive, at the very least, and is notorious for making big promises and delivering crappy products.

Bookhabit’s pricing model makes it feel like a vanity press. Is it reasonable for them to take a 60% cut? Okay, they have to cover site costs somehow, but their rates just aren’t competitive.

Lulu, for example, takes a 25% commission on top of royalties. So for the ‘equivalent’ price of a Bookhabit book, $2.50, you the author are making $2 as opposed to Bookhabit’s $1. And at Lulu — indeed, all other distribution sites I’ve found thus far — you’re free to set your own pricing structure. If you want to give your ebook away for free, go nuts. If you want to sell it for $100, you can go nuts on that, too.

So 60% is a lot, and Bookhabit’s author pay-out model is deliberately structured to keep most of those royalties within the site itself. When signing up, you the author agrees that Bookhabit doesn’t have to pay you until you’ve earned a stored total of $50 in revenue. That’s a sale of 42 books, and if you look at the site I don’t think there’s a single book (at least, not one that I could find) that’s yet hit that mark. Bookhabit, in fact, encourages its authors to use their pre-$50 revenue to buy other books from the site. In other words, the whole place is essentially set up like one big pyramid scheme with Bookhabit itself the only one ever really making any money.

The fact of the long tail is that almost no-one is ever going to hit that magical $50 margin; Random and I have, for example, $6 in “royalties” that we are never ever going to see again. In essence, Bookhabit ‘owes’ us $6 but because they’re never going to have to pay it out, they’re free to — in effect — use that $6 as if it were site profit. There’s actually a financial term for this kind of trading off unactualised liabilities that I’m sure I’d be able to remember if I were an economist rather than a writer, but if I’m not mistaken it’s considered really bad practice and has, in fact, sent not just a few businesses bankrupt.

Dodgy accounting and huge royalties aside, Bookhabit also just doesn’t offer any value-add services to authors. Okay, they have a blog they occasionally use to promote some of their authors in. Well, you know what? I have a blog I occasionally use to promote authors in^iv and a) I’m pretty sure I have a higher readership than they do, and b) I don’t charge a 60% commission.

For an unpublished author looking for a distribution service there are much better choices out there. For all its problems, the aforementioned Lulu will sell you an ISBN and get your book listed on Amazon. Plus, of course, they do PoD printing. Mobipocket also has links to Amazon and other ebook distribution services. And if you’re a US citizen you can go straight to the source and distribute your book for the Kindle. All of these services have higher royalties, larger markets and more flexible pricing structures.

All of which is why Random and I pulled Chainbreaker from the site. We’re still struggling through our long tail, but we’ll struggle through it without supporting a site I don’t think is set up to do anything other than exploit aspiring authors.

1. For the record, because it will change long before this post does. ↩
2. And, indeed, “critical acclaim” and “popular appeal” more often than not have an inverse relationship. ↩
3. Okay okay, I registered twice. Forgive me! ↩
4. Got an ebook you think I might like? Drop me a line! ↩

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