The collapse of the publishing industry

The New York Times missed the real story when it wrote about a nonexistent decline in ebook sales. Unsurprisingly, Fortune manages to do rather better in observing that the decline is limited to the traditional publishers, who are losing out to their smaller rivals:

A recent piece in the New York Times about a decline in e-book sales had more than a whiff of anti-digital Schadenfreude about it. The story, which was based on sales figures from the Association of American Publishers, implied that much of the hype around e-books had evaporated — with sales falling by 10% in the first half of this year — while good old printed books were doing better than everyone expected.

This was celebrated by many as evidence that e-books aren’t all they are cracked up to be, and that consumers are swinging back to printed books. But is that an accurate reflection of what’s actually taking place in the book-publishing or book-buying market? Not really, as it turns out.

When I first saw the story, I thought it raised two important questions, neither of which was really answered conclusively in the piece (although the second was hinted at). Namely: 1) Are e-book sales as a whole dropping, or just the sales of the publishers who are members of the AAP? And 2) Isn’t a drop in sales just a natural outcome of the publishers’ move to keep e-book prices high?

Data from the site Author Earnings, which tracks a broad spectrum of information related to digital publishing, suggests that both of those things are true. In other words, a decline in market share on the part of established publishers is being taken as evidence of a drop in e-book sales overall, and at least some of the falloff in market share that publishers have seen is likely the result of high e-book prices.

What’s really happening is that overall sales are remaining close to flat, but the mainstream publishers are rapidly losing out to small and independent publishers. I jazzed up Hugh Howey’s Author Earnings report to make it more obvious what has been happening over the last 15 months, which just happens to coincide with the birth of Castalia House.

In other words, the share of ebook sales that belong to the major publishers have plunged from 39 percent down 26 percent due to the rise in ebooks published by Independents and Amazon itself. This is due to several factors, ranging from increasingly mediocre authors being signed by the editorial staffs to foolish pricing decisions by the business people.

I suspect the decline in the self-published category was initially due to Amazon skimming off the best of them, followed by the change in Kindle Unlimited rules that deter the publication of very short ebooks. The KU change probably also explains why Indie growth has leveled off since May.

To put it into more personal terms, and to explain why Tor will continue to have John Scalzi running himself ragged on non-stop book tours until his contract is eventually canceled prior to its completion, consider the following comparison between several recently published books. All the numbers were current as of 6:30 AM EST.

END OF ALL THINGS
190 reviews
Publisher: Tor (August 13, 2015)
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #342,147 Paid in Kindle Store

Paperback
Publisher: Tor
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #218,704 in Books

Hardcover: 384 pages
Publisher: Tor Books; 1st Ed edition (August 11, 2015)
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,935 in Books

LOCK IN
497 reviews
Publisher: Tor Books (August 26, 2014)
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #24,214 Paid in Kindle Store

Mass Market Paperback: 336 pages
Publisher: Tor Science Fiction (August 4, 2015)
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #24,372 in Books

Hardcover: 336 pages
Publisher: Tor Books; 1 edition (August 26, 2014)
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #61,079 in Books

SJWS ALWAYS LIE
301 reviews
Publisher: Castalia House (August 25, 2015)
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,359 Paid in Kindle Store

Paperback: 236 pages
Publisher: Castalia House
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #11,250 in Books


GORILLA MINDSET
181 reviews
Publication Date: June 27, 2015
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,674 Paid in Kindle Store

Paperback: 212 pages
Publisher: CreateSpace (June 28, 2015)
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,792 in Books

This is interesting because what it tells us is that the only people interested in reading Scalzi’s latest are his longtime fans who are completing the series. They’re buying the hardcover to round out their collections, but the casual readers aren’t even bothering to read it. Lock In, on the other hand has shown more appeal to casual readers, but it’s not particularly popular, especially for one of Tor’s top authors. Scalzi is far from a failure; he’s #54 in Kindle eBooks > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction by virtue of all his books selling reasonably well. I am merely #329.

But then look at how well other indie authors (and RTRH contributors) such as B.V. Larson (#13 in SF), Christopher Nuttall (#25 in SF), and David van Dyke (#99 in SF) are doing without the support of the largest publisher in science fiction.

This is a serious problem for the major publishers because ebook sales are a literally less-than-zero-sum game at this point in time. Regardless, it’s not so much the direct competition that threatens to do the big publishers in as it is the new X-factor in ebook sales, which is Kindle Unlimited. Notice which two types of publishers have been doing well since the KU change: Amazon and Small to Medium Publishers.

For an explanation, consider this book, which competes directly with Scalzi’s “military science fiction”, Back From the Dead by Rolf Nelson.

BACK FROM THE DEAD
9 reviews

Publisher: Castalia House (September 22, 2015)
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,794 Paid in Kindle Store

What is astonishing about the moderate success of the Nelson book is that it has “sold” 4x more books via Kindle Unlimited than it has through conventional book sales. Keep in mind these aren’t just “paid” sales, they are books that have been downloaded and read.

KU works very well for longer, inexpensive indie books; with his book’s KNPC, Rolf makes more money from a KU read than he does from an Amazon sale at $4.99. (NB: This isn’t confidential information, it’s all right there on Amazon for those who comprehend the system.) But more importantly, most of those KU readers are not Castalia fans, they are mostly new to Rolf’s work.

(By way of testing this hypothesis, I’ve added a page to Back From the Dead letting readers know about other Castalia books available on KU. If I’m correct, this should have the result of increasing the average Kpages read for the other books listed.)

KU is Amazon’s real challenge to the mainstream publishers. It was bad enough for them competing on a level playing field with ebooks that cost one-half to one-fourth the price of their own ebooks. But how can they possibly compete with all-you-can read for $10, especially when Amazon is going out of its way to promote those books? For the price of one-third of a new Tor ebook, you can read literally dozens of KU books such as Riding the Red Horse, A Throne of Bones, On War, and Back From the Dead, many of which are objectively better than the Tor books, at least as far as the Amazon ratings and reviews are concerned. And the problem for the major publishers is only going to get worse as the KU readers discover new favorite authors, and new publishers, and begin to read their way through their non-mainstream catalogs.

Ebooks were disruptive, but KU is going to cause several of the major publishers to go out of business. The Big Five will be the Big Three inside three years.

That being said, there is observably a distinct type of KU reader. They clearly prefer lighter, faster-reading fiction fare; while SJWAL has sold 5x more copies so far this month than Back From the Dead, the latter has 3.7x more KU pages read.

The price of free trade

Remember when the idea was that offshoring all the manufacturing jobs would lead to better, higher-paying jobs in technology? Yeah, about that….

The IT workers at Cengage Learning in the company’s Mason, Ohio offices learned of their fates game-show style. First, they were told to gather in a large conference room. There were vague remarks from an IT executive about a “transition.” Slides were shown that listed employee names, directing them to one of three rooms where they would be told specifically what was happening to them. Some employees were cold with worry.

The biggest group, those getting pink slips, were told to remain in the large conference room. Workers directed to go through what we’ll call Door No. 2, were offered employment with IT offshore outsourcing firm Cognizant. That was the smallest group. And those sent through Door No. 3 remained employed in Cengage’s IT department. This happened in mid-October.

“I was so furious,” said one of the IT workers over what happened. It seemed “surreal,” said another. There was disbelief, but little surprise. Cengage, a major producer of educational content and services, had outsourced accounting services earlier in the year. The IT workers rightly believed they were next.

The employees were warned that speaking to the news media meant loss of severance. Despite their fears, they want their story told. They want people to know what’s happening to IT jobs in the heartland. They don’t want the offshoring of their livelihoods to pass in silence.

The Web-based workers that the Cengage employees are training to take over their jobs are believed to be in India. Cognizant applies for thousands of H-1B visas annually, and is one of
the top three users of the visa, according to government data. Cengage
employees reached for comment didn’t know what visa, if any, the
contract workers in their offices were using.

There are four things you need to keep in mind if you are an ardent free trader:

  1. The arguments justifying free trade have always been entirely theoretical, not empirical. In this way, they are no different than the incorrect pre-scientific logical conclusions that were subsequently proven to be false by modern science. At the time they were formulated, inexpensive shipping, the free movement of capital, and the mass movement of labor were unknown.
  2. The USA historically enjoyed its fastest periods of economic growth under protectionist, restricted-immigration periods.
  3. The post-WWII growth was not the result of any trade or economic policies, but a positive application of Broken Window theory. Every other industrial nation had its industrial capacity smashed, so the US benefited from an intrinsic infrastructural advantage for around 25 years.
  4. Free trade levels all prices throughout the market. That’s why a cashier in Miami gets paid about the same amount as a cashier in Portland. Even if free trade increases the overall amount of global economic growth, in doing so, it necessarily reduces wages and standards of living in the wealthier nations to bring them more in line with the wages and standards of living in the poorest nations.

Look, I was an ardent theoretical free trader for decades. I know the pro-free trade arguments better than you do; my father gave me Free to Choose to read when I was ten years old. But the fact is, the theoretical arguments are incorrect; the conclusions their logic predicted have turned out to be observably wrong.

And perhaps you remember what I wrote about how half of all young Americans will have to leave the country in order to find work under a true global free trade regime?  The stage for that is already being set.

Offshore outsourcing is having “a fairly strong impact” on IT employment, said Janulaitis. Students coming out of college are facing trouble starting a career “and a lot of that is driven by jobs that are taken by non-U.S. nationals in our economy, and a lot of that is H-1B [visa holders],” he said.

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Let the witches burn

Milo asks if the Right should try to save the universities from the rampaging SJWs:

Students of history will notice an alarming similarity in the video above to the “struggle sessions” of Maoist China, a form of public shaming in which perceived enemies of the Party would be surrounded in a public place by Red Guards, Mao’s most zealous supporters. The Red Guards would hurl abuse at their target until they confessed to their crimes.

Uninformed critics might argue that the Red Guards were a weapon of the Communist state, and not a genuine grassroots movement, but they’d be wrong: the Red Guards started out as a student movement, on Chinese campuses. Afraid yet?

College staff finally are. Earlier this year, Vox published an essay from a liberal professor who confessed that the zealotry of his own students frightened him. Earlier this month, Salon published an article from a black feminist film studies lecturer, describing her “disastrous” attempt to accommodate her students’ strangely aggressive emotional fragility. It seems the left, and especially the academic left, has finally woken up to the Frankenstein’s monster that they’ve constructed.

You’ll forgive me if I lack sympathy. Conservatives have warned for decades that the proliferation of women’s studies, colonial studies, gay studies, and an assortment of other oppression-studies courses would end in tears. We also warned you that campus speech codes were a bad idea.

And when conservatives and critics of Islam started being banned on campuses up and down the country, we warned you that a tidal wave of zealotry, intolerance, and even totalitarianism was coming. Now it’s here. As a famous internet meme goes, you only had to listen. Now it’s too late.

No, we should not be saving them. We need to build alternative institutions and keep the SJWs out. One infected and infested, the only solution is to burn it to the ground. If they want to start the cleansing fires, let them.

US military defeat expected

And as they debate the best way to prepare to fight the Russians, they’re not even looking at the more serious problem presently facing the U.S. military forces in Europe:

Ironically, this Washington war of ideas has pitted against each other two brainy career Army officers who fought together in one of the most famous battles of modern times.

On one side is Macgregor, an outspoken and controversial advocate for reform of the Army — whose weapons he describes as “obsolescent,” its senior leaders as “self-interested,” and its spending as “wasteful.” Viewed by many of his colleagues as one of the most innovative Army officers of his generation, Macgregor, a West Point graduate with a Ph.D. in international relations (“he can be pretty gruff,” a fellow West Point graduate says, “but he’s brilliant”), led the 2nd Cav’s “Cougar Squadron” in the best-known battle of Operation Desert Storm in February 1991. In 23 minutes, Macgregor’s force destroyed an entire Iraqi Armored Brigade (including nearly 70 Iraqi armored vehicles), while suffering a single American casualty. Speaking at a military “lessons learned” conference one year later, Air Force General Jack Welsh described the Battle of 73 Easting (named for a map coordinate) as “a stunning, overwhelming victory.”

In the wake of the battle, however, Macgregor calculated that if his unit had fought a highly trained and better armed enemy, like the Russians, the outcome would have been different. So, four years later, he published a book called Breaking The Phalanx, recommending that his service “restructure itself into modularly organized, highly mobile, self-contained combined arms teams.” The advice received the endorsement of then-Army Chief of Staff Dennis Reimer, who ordered that copies of Macgregor’s book be provided to every Army general.

But Macgregor is still fighting that battle. In early September he circulated a PowerPoint presentation showing that in a head-to-head confrontation pitting the equivalent of a U.S. armored division against a likely Russian adversary, the U.S. division would be defeated. “Defeated isn’t the right word,” Macgregor told me last week. “The right word is annihilated.” The 21-slide presentation features four battle scenarios, all of them against a Russian adversary in the Baltics — what one currently serving war planner on the Joint Chiefs staff calls “the most likely warfighting scenario we will face outside of the Middle East.”

In two of the scenarios, where the U.S. deploys its current basic formation, called brigade combat teams (BCTs), the U.S. is defeated. In two other scenarios, where Macgregor deploys what he calls Reconnaissance Strike Groups, the U.S. wins. And that’s the crux of Macgregor’s argument: Today the U.S. Army is comprised of BCTs rather than Reconnaissance Strike Groups, or RSGs, which is Macgregor’s innovation. Macgregor’s RSG shears away what he describes as “the top-heavy Army command structure” that would come with any deployment in favor of units that generate more combat power. “Every time we deploy a division we deploy a division headquarters of 1,000 soldiers and officers,” Macgregor explains. “What a waste; those guys will be dead within 72 hours.” Macgregor’s RSG, what he calls “an alternative force design,” does away with this Army command echelon, reporting to a joint force commander — who might or might not be an Army officer. An RSG, Macgregor says, does not need the long supply tail that is required of Brigade Combat Teams — it can be sustained with what it carries from ten days to two weeks without having to be resupplied.

Though it may sound to outsiders like a disagreement over crossed t’s
and dotted i’s, the dispute is fundamental–focusing on whether, in a
future conflict, the U.S. military can actually win. Even inside the
Pentagon, that is very much in doubt. A recent article by defense writer
Julia Ioffe reported the “dispiriting” results of a Pentagon “thought
exercise” between a red team (Russia) and a blue team, NATO. The “table
top” exercise stipulated a Russian invasion of the Baltics, the same
scenario proposed by Macgregor. “After eight hours of gaming out various
scenarios,” Ioffe wrote, a blue team member concluded that NATO “would
lose.”

What I find more worrisome is the possibility that the U.S. government will decide to throw its weight against the nationalists who have overthrown, either electorally or by other means, a European government, as they did in the case of Serbia. I can envision a situation where U.S. forces step in to create a Ukraine-style puppet government in defense of the poor Muslim refugees, in which case they’ll be faced with European 4GW opponents far more lethal than anything they have seen in the Middle East or in Asia.

It may seem unthinkable, but there are already serious tensions inside the German government, where the Interior Minister is accused of having mounted a semi-coup against the Chancellor, and his new stricter policy was overruled, not by the Prime Minister, but by her Chief of Staff. It would be surprising, but not entirely unexpected, for Merkel’s government to collapse before the end of the year. And there are tens of thousands of American troops still stationed in Germany; the temptation to use them to dictate German government policy on the migration crisis will be difficult for any U.S. president to resist.

Whatever happens, there can be little doubt that the rising European nationalist forces will have the backing of Russia, and probably China as well, as both of those countries clearly recognize the threat the globalist U.S. now poses to world order.

The Lord of the Rings, 2015 edition

If Tolkien had been a modern German or Swedish politician instead of a true Man of the West, I imagine The Lord of the Rings would have proceeded a little bit differently.

After all, if you think about it, what were the orcs of Mordor but poor, violently oppressed refugees with nothing to eat but other, smaller refugees, escaping an oppressive, undemocratic regime and seeking a better life in the West? If stopped at the borders of Osgiliath and sent back to Mordor, they faced forcible conscription into the Dark Lord’s armies, which is why they all had a strong claim on receiving asylum and permanent residence from Gondor.

Meanwhile, Ann Coulter notes that these poor oppressed refugees are busy enjoying the better life they sought.

“Migrants” from North Africa, brutally gang rape 23 yr-old Swedish girl, anally & vaginally 6X. Called their friends to join in.

IMMIGRATION IS RAPE CULTURE.
IMMIGRATION IS INVASION.

And the wreckers wreck

The SJWs in science fiction and fantasy are now erasing Lovecraft from the genre. Because raciss:

David Hartwell announced at the World Fantasy Award ceremony on November 8 that this will be the last year that the award trophy will be in the form of the traditional — and controversial — H.P. Lovecraft bust designed by Gahan Wilson.

    #WFC2015 #wfcon2015 David Hartwell just announced this is the last year the World Fantasy Award will be the H.P.Lovecraft statue!

    — EK Tremontaine (@EllenKushner) November 8, 2015

Last year Daniel Jose Older collected over 2,500 signatures on a petition calling for the replacement of “avowed racist and a terrible wordsmith” H.P. Lovecraft on the World Fantasy Award.

None of the SJWs writing today, no matter how many awards they give each other, will have one-tenth the lasting literary impact that Lovecraft did. None of them has his imagination; the very best they have to offer can only offer pallid, perverted imitations of him.

Show them no mercy. None whatsoever.

The essence of SJW

This SJW summed up the core essence of social justice and the reason for social justice convergence beautifully in his response to my tweet about the collapse of North Heights Lutheran:

We have no issues here. Backwards thinking congregations look to be the problem. I’m sorry if any religion cannot be progressive then it should die and quickly.

It is very important, it is VITAL, to understand this point. If any religion, or game, or media platform, or chess club, or university, or corporation, or institution, or organization cannot be progressive, then it should die and quickly.

SJWs envision one of two scenarios when they invade an organization. They will either coopt it and converge it, or they will kill it.

If you do not understand that, if you do not understand that they would rather destroy the organization than permit it to survive as a bastion of crimethink and badfeelz, you will almost inevitably lose. That is why the SJWs in science fiction were willing to burn down five Hugo categories rather than permit them to be recaptured by anti-progressive forces.

They were not only willing to do so, they celebrated the fact, because if a Hugo Award category cannot be progressive, then it should die and quickly.

The wages of female “pastorship”

It is death for a church. OL writes:

Just wanted to let you know that the church-in-exile formally known as North Heights Lutheran have been given an excerpt of SWJAL. It is currently making the rounds as they come to grips with the fact that their church has been stolen. It is a textbook example of what happens when you try to play nice with evil rather then curb stomp it. Although it is really to late for them the lesson can be shown to those that will listen, perhaps on how to prevent this from occurring elsewhere.

Although I’ve attended North Heights a few times in the long-distant past and my parents were friends with the pastor, I didn’t have any idea what happened there. This story is spun in the SJWs’ favor, but if you read between the lines it’s not hard to figure out what took place. SJWs invade, take over the decision-making high ground, chase off half the congregation with their anti-Christian social justice theology, then start shutting down churches to sell the land.

One of the state’s original mega-churches is in trouble.

North Heights Lutheran Church in Arden Hills laid off half its staff in June and closed a satellite church in Roseville. That closure led half of the parishioners to split away and worship in a nearby motel — and church loyalists are feeling betrayed.

The church faces a crossroads.

“We are either going to be reborn,” said interim pastor Mindy Bak, in a silent church hallway, “or we are going to go through a slow death.”

The combination of financial problems, downsizing and, some say, a female pastor has led to a schism in the church, threatening its future as recriminations fly back and forth.

The breakaway group is posting its complaints on a website called “Church torn apart.

“They accuse church leaders of being deceptive, even “satanic.”

But most of their objections, said Bak, are related to her gender — they don’t want a woman to lead their church.

“If you carry that prejudice,” Bak said, “how can you serve the community?”

Meanwhile, Sunday attendance has dropped two-thirds from its peak. 

Notice that “the community” is the SJW’s concern. Not serving Jesus Christ. This is exactly what social justice convergence in the Christian Church looks like today; a deep concern for “the community” and “the world” and absolutely no concern for Jesus Christ, Christianity, or the Church.

Never permit female leadership in the Church. It will absolutely kill any church that is foolish enough to do so after seeing what has happened in every single church that has done so already. The sort of women who want to be church leaders are almost invariably SJWs; when appointing a female pastor you might as well put up a sign announcing that the church has changed denominations from Baptist or Methodist or whatever to Social Justice.

Notice how the invaders always end up with the buildings and the land. They don’t give a damn about God or the congregation. “We are either going to be reborn or we are going to go through a slow death.” What does that tell you? The one thing that isn’t an option is for a successful Christian congregation to carry on as before, simply God in the name of Jesus Christ.

This phenomenon of the “stolen church” is not new. This is the third case of which I have heard and the second time it has happened to a church I personally attended at one point or another. Paul warned about this; most church leaderships have been absolutely derelict in their duty to police their congregations, and in particular, their elders.

UPDATE: it gets worse:

Just heard from my mother that the “vision” of the female pastor is to integrate Muslims and Christians in a new progressive church. They call it Chrislam.