I’m back to dealing with getting The Steep Climes Quartet out into the world with the upcoming publication date of June 15, for Over Brooklyn Hills, the third book of the series. This means that I’m back in the frustrating level of redundancy required in a book’s production, at least if the publisher desires access to more pathways for readers to find and buy the book or ebook (or audiobook, but that’s even more demanding).
For the writer/production editor/publisher, the advent of Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) back in November 2007 changed the landscape of trade publishing for good and bad. Keep in mind that we are two decades into the real start of ebooks, even though, as an editor of digital publishing professional periodicals, I’d attended two earlier cycles of ebook conferences starting sometime in the late 1980s, and the idea of ebooks had been around for an even longer time. Ted Nelson and his book Hypertext, anyone?
As it turned out, it took Amazon’s commitment to this emerging marketplace to provide momentum out of the starting gate. Keep in mind that Amazon was still in early stages of its world domination and was a generally well-regarded corporation doing what many people thought were helpful things. Things like online shopping, fast shipping, competitive prices, and other sorts of attractive retail behavior. The common view of Amazon these days is negative, and for many good reasons. I won’t go into details here—they’re well-known. In fact, I’ve done my share of critiquing, including writing essays titled “Horsewhip Jeff Bezos, Part One” and “Horsewhip Jeff Bezos, Part Two.” If you want an excellent description of what’s going on with online platforms, read Cory Doctorow’s essays on “enshittification.”
What It Takes for Books to Gain “The Channels”
The third book of The Steep Climes Quartet, Over Brooklyn Hills, is on pre-order, with a publication date of June 15, 2026, but in order to make the book and the others in the series as widely available as possible, hoops must be jumped through.
Amazon is the single largest bookseller in the known universe, and the platform makes buying books easy (unlike the search function for most other goods available through Amazon), so there’s that. Get the book on Amazon and Bob‘s your uncle, that’s the thinking. But there’s also significant opposition to Amazon these days and, understandably, especially so from other booksellers and book buyers loyal to independent bookstores and those all-around anti-Amazon folks. Bookshop.org has done a decent job providing an Amazon alternative for online book-buying and has the anti-Amazon public’s support mainly because it directs the sales to independent bookstores.
If I want to sell my books in independent bookstores in addition to Amazon, I can. Well, I can if my book has a real ISBN and doesn’t use the one Amazon freely offers publishers, which isn’t a real ISBN, but an ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number) that is independent of the ISBN usage by other bookstores. The practical consequence is that other bookstores simply won’t sell ASIN-only books, and it is not merely pique on their part, but also logistical: the rest of the trade book selling world uses ISBN inventory and pricing for their stock, something Amazon has known to be the case for decades upon decades. I also need to make sure that my books are available through a book distributor so that independent bookstores can order them, which for the trade market in the U.S. means Ingram, and don’t you know they own Lightning Source, an online platform for publishing both print and ebooks.
So now I’m using two publishing platforms, both of which produce the books as print-on-demand.
Of course, there also is the issue of ebook production, format, and distribution. For KDP, that’s easy enough and the ingestion interface has gotten better over time, so there are fewer publishers now having strokes when trying to get an ebook—a Kindle—out into the world. Of course, when you publish through KDP you’re limited to selling the Kindle ebook through Amazon, unless, that is, you use an additional ebook publishing platform, where the real value is in its distribution, ebook production being relatively easy. Alternate ebook distribution makes the ebook—ePub—available through Apple Books, Kobo, Barnes and Noble, and many other channels, including into libraries. I’ve found Draft2Digital effective in this way.
So now I’m using three publishing platforms.
The Signal-to-Noise Challenge Loudly Continues
Of course, so are millions of other self-publishers, or whatever the actual number is, using publishing platforms. There are 3-4 million such books reportedly getting published annually these days, at least according to people who wish to break my spirit, as the sheer volume of new books creates a signal-to-noise problem for those searching for a particular book or ebook. I’m jumping through hoops making sure that my books are available through many channels, all in the hope that people will seek the books out and buy them. There’s the needle-in-a-haystack problem, something metadata and the right keywords were supposed to solve, but now there’s a humongous haystack that keeps discoverability difficult. AI search that adds context derived from the actual content of the book instead of relying just on metadata is the next great hope, but really, the search engines and social platforms want to sell ads, promising discoverability for a price.
Who knew that I wasn’t going to become rich by writing fiction?!
Well, as things stand today, my goal is to sell enough books to more or less cover my costs, so that my modest retirement funds don’t too rapidly disappear. And I haven’t yet included audiobooks to the equation, not because audiobooks are a bad idea, but because the main platform, Audible, is now owned by Amazon, and the whole royalty setup is downright terrible for authors. Also, I’m still annoyed that most people seem to like audiobooks more than print or ebooks, and, yes, I’m still sulking.