Indie Publishing and Business To Business Thinking

A general frustration I’m having with self-publishing/indy publishing circles right now

Indies are, by and large, a business-to-business endeavour that primarily exist to provide ebooks to distributors and retailers who then sell them to the customer.

Many of those distributors and retailers give an extraordinary level of control to the authors around pricing and promotion, convincing them they’re actually business-to-consumer. It’s become a foundational assumption in the rhetoric around indie publishing, even if it’s not true.

So many people’s frustrations stem from this misunderstanding once they’re past the initial learning curve. The idea that you adjust some part of your product to make it appealing *to the business that actually sells it* is frequently met with all kids of denial, particularly when the suggestion involves increasing your prices beyond the just-barely-making-a-profit baseline.

Indie authors have been trained to focus on the customer above all else, and have stuck to the strategy that undercutting traditional publishing’s prices is the only viable path to success. Frequently, the argument seems to be, “readers won’t pay that” or “I don’t want to pay that for a book”, despite the fact that traditional publishing has made it clear readers will pay decent money for a good book they really want to read.

(My rule a thumb, back when I first indie published in 2005, was “figure out how much you think a book is worth, then add a buck because you’re incredibly bad at gauging the value of your work”. These days, I’d probably add two).

At the same time everyone’s ignoring the business-to-business aspect of their business, there’s a low-level hostility to the work required to set up direct sales channels where you’re *actually* a business-to-consumer business, and can really capitalise on the increased margins on every sale.

And many of those who do take the plunge of selling direct immediately look for ways to hand the logistics back to the businesses they’re already dealing with, because they don’t actually want to have a direct relationship with their consumers.

I like to think this is frustrating because these conversations are happening ore often and we’re heading towards a pivot point, a place where folks are developing a more mature understanding of the business strategies and how to engage with the players involved.

But there are days when I definitely have to pull myself away from the keyboard, lets I find myself trapped in one of those “someone is wrong on the internet” conversations that keeps me awake until 3:00 AM mounting an argument I can’t win…

(originally posted on the book of face, 23 June, 2022)