I knew they would come for those books. I knew it. And that's only the beginning. (Although their greed may keep romance alive.)

I never used the affiliates program and never will. In fact, I stopped using Amazon ads this year (and yes, I see a loss of sales).

You can re-order links in Books2Read, and I have put my PayHip on top, followed by Bookshop org and Smashwords (which now pays 75% royalties), before I list Amazon.

Same on my website.

And I'm going "wide" with Print.

@Firlefanz About ten years ago now (time flies), I did some research on costs, on how to set up an alternative to the POD system from Amazon, which leaves brutally little for authors or small publishers. In my opinion, this is holding back growth of small publishers more than so many other factors, because it's a complaint I heard over and over.

The TL;DR of it is, it doesn't seem impossible. The harder part is that the printers I spoke to were fearing an uberization of...

@Firlefanz ... their services, i.e. where I provide a platform on which they compete, which ultimately drives down their price. I guess the experience with Amazon had burned them badly.

At the same time, mid-sized printers have invested heavily into POD-style printing solutions (TL;DR), so they are ready for this kind of thing, by and large.

I dropped that whole line of thought for a number of reasons back then, but I still feel it is missing. And more precisely, I think...

@Firlefanz ... what is missing is a co-op style organization for this rather than a market-driven one.

Perhaps it is time to dig out my notes and have more serious conversations about this? 🤔

@jens

I definitely lean towards a co-op rather than market-driven. I would even be willing to share in the cost.

Indie Authors Unite! or something along those lines. 🙂

@susankayequinn

@Firlefanz Oh yeah, I mean, definitely a Co-Op. As it so happens, my day job has given me a bunch of insights there as well, so I feel way better prepared for this than I was when I first had the idea.

It's more that back then I was thinking of barriers to growth for indie publishing. Now I think about it more are "keep civilization running in the face of the threat the fascist-capitalist-complex poses". Both, really :)

@susankayequinn

What I have been thinking of is basically a Store List Central, where indies can list their stores or websites. A place where readers can go to find books and authors by genre or such.

Organizing this to keep out spammers and AI sloperators will be a bit tricky, but maybe a membership fee will help (possibly staggered according to income).

Members will have to provide the genres and keywords for their listing, and possibly volunteer some hours to keep the List clean.

@jens

@Firlefanz Right, and that makes a lot of sense. We could actually use some ActivityPub magic here and federate content (TL;DR).

My thinking was a lot more along the logistics side of things. The basic problem is this: print on demand is great up to a certain number of printed copies. After that, the cost per copy becomes prohibitive compared to offset printing.

Which really means that the growth of indies is limited by their growth, and that's unsolvable in itself.

So.

@Firlefanz Changing this for a smoother transition from one kind of print to the other, and/or sharing of costs to get onto offset printing faster, those are things one could look into *eventually*. They're complex to solve.

But what's simple - well, in comparison - is Kickstarter-like financing. It's pretty easy to precalculate costs per copy for N copies. What's harder to solve is the logistics: where to print, so that shipping is affordable?

There's a balance between...

@Firlefanz ... trying to batch print runs into one location vs. having two or three across the globe, combined with regional distribution partners and warehouses, which is *really complex* if you want to do it yourself.

But as a service for a number of indies? It becomes tractable, moves from hair-pulling-out to something that spreadsheet wrangling or - wildest dreams - an algorithm can optimize for.

TL;DR:

a) get "crowdfund and print+distribute this book" solved
...

@Firlefanz
...
b) move towards some sorts of systems where a small portion of the savings go to funds that help even smaller indies make that hurdle.

I spoke to a bunch of printers back then, and they're just worried such a platform will be used to set them in competition with each other and drive prices into the ground. OTOH I feel like they're pressured enough by Amazon, Bertelsmann, etc. that they wouldn't mind an escape route.

So offering them representation in a co-op...

@Firlefanz ... might be the thing that'll get them interested. That way, the threat of bidding wars goes away, they will see more rather than fewer orders from an author/indie network, etc.

That's the hope, at least. It'd need to start with a few conversations.