Road Trip 2: The Search for Paperbacks

First, an update on my self-publishing venture. I finally finished the clean-up edits and got all the chapters together into one big file. Now I need to read over the Smashwords style guide again before I actually do anything. Then it’s dive into the deep end of the formatting pool. I don’t know how long this will take me, but I’ve reached the point where there’s no turning back. More on this venture to come.

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I don’t know how many writers are reading this, or how you go about doing market research, but here’s a tale of some impromptu research my car and I did over the past two weeks. I burned up a lot of gas and learned a few troubling facts about my chosen market. To wit:

It all started last year, when I went to the local KMart and discovered Harlequin Nocturne (their paranormal line) was now being packaged as doubles, one thick book containing two novels by the same or two different authors. No more single titles? Huh. Okay. I don’t buy that many anyway. There was a time I’d considered subbing to the Nocturne line, but I couldn’t write a book that was long enough, or dark enough. That twisted humor of mine kept sneaking in. However, I read a few to get the idea of what they wanted, and found some authors I enjoyed reading, even if I was never able to join them. So now they’re doubles? Okay, no big deal.

Recently, however, I went on the Harlequin site and discovered single Nocturne titles are still being published. Not just as ebooks, either. In paperback. You can order them on the Harlequin site or from Amazon, where I went to double-check. On top of that, one my favorite writers had a new book out. Why can’t I get it from the bookstore shelves?

Because nobody’s carrying the single title Nocturnes any more, that’s why. I know. I looked. This is that story.

A bit of background first. I live in Lancaster County, PA, which has a large Amish and Mennonite population and is about as hardline religiously conservative as any Southern state you can name. Paranormal romance, erotic or vanilla, is not too welcome here. (No one seems to mind 50 Shades of Grey crowding the store shelves within easy reach of the kiddies, but that’s different. That one earns Big Bucks.) If Nocturnes were difficult to find in my area, I never considered that surprising. The surprises started when I roamed afield to the neighboring counties (Berks, Lebanon and York), and none of them were pleasant.

Just to be safe, I started my search outside Lancaster County. Berks has a Kmart, a WalMart, and a Barnes & Noble, just like us. The KMart only carried Nocturne doubles. The WalMart carries Harlequins, but not the Nocturne line. The Berks Barnes & Noble was also Nocturne-free. Lancaster’s B&N dropped Nocturne from its shelves a while ago. I didn’t realize until then the drop might be chain-wide. The Target didn't carry Harlequins at all.

The next day I tried my other neighboring county, Lebanon. The KMart only had doubles. I skipped the Lebanon WalMart because it was off my planned route. My target was an indie bookstore in one of Lebanon’s malls. It was there last year. It isn’t now. The Sprint store that replaced it wasn’t helpful, so I moved on.

My next stop was a news store two towns down the road. This one carried a large selection of books and magazines, once upon a time. Not any more. The shelf space devoted to reading has been shrinking as the gift-shop aspect takes over. They still carry books, but not Harlequins of any kind, let alone Nocturne. By next year I doubt if they’ll even carry books, beyond the ubiquitous best-sellers.

On to the next county, York. York has a Books A Million in what used to be a Borders. Lancaster used to have a Books A Million in the Park City Mall, but it’s closed now. The mall which at one time housed three bookstores now has none that I’m aware of. My favorite news store still exists, but it too is transitioning into a gift shop. They only carry used books anyway.

Over in York I found the Books A Million not exactly doing a brisk business. On the other hand, it was a weekday. Books A Million carried Nocturne, but only the doubles, not singles. If I were to sell a manuscript to Nocturne tomorrow, the only place I could buy my own book would be off the Internet, unless I want to wait for it to be included in a double. That assumes the line’s even still going in the year or two it takes a printed book to get to market. Doesn’t sound too encouraging, does it?

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So here’s my takeaway from three days of road-tripping. Make of it what you will.

The market for paranormal romance may be waning, at least as far as Harlequin is concerned. Paranormals from other publishers are still out there, but are they from new writers or only from established, best-selling authors? That was something I forgot to check. I know that fewer venues are even offering Nocturnes now, which leads to fewer sales, which leads to eventual cancellation. You can’t buy something if you can’t find it. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Bookstores themselves appear to be on the wane. Two good-sized stores that were operating last year are gone now. The shutting of the Books A Million at Park City means Barnes & Noble is now the only major bookstore in all of Lancaster County. B&N, as previously noted, stopped carrying Nocturnes some time ago, as did WalMart. Stores want to stock what sells.

If you’re looking for good news, here’s a tidbit: B&N and BAM both had a lot of shelf space devoted to Young Adult novels. Paranormal’s getting sparse there, too. Oversaturation thanks to Twilight. The big deal now appears to be Fantasy With Powers, or Game of Thrones/X-Men mashups. I’m reading yet another one right now. I might have a few words to say on that subject next week.

Oh, and Books A Million, whose bread and butter stems from books, does not carry any writers’ magazines. Wonder what that’s supposed to indicate?

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My debut self-published novel? It’s a paranormal romance. Not even erotic. There’s a lot of shape-shifting but very little sex. Am I shooting myself in the foot? Dunno. I know M/M’s still big. I may start easing over into M/M contemporary. I’m also going to think more seriously about those YA ideas I have percolating. Mine are more SF flavored, contemporary with powers. I haven’t seen too many of those yet. Maybe I can kick off a trend.

Random Musings

It’s another one of those days where my mind’s a blank, so I’m just going to ramble about whatever pops into my head. Naked movie stars. Nope. Gonna keep it clean.

I was cruising the aisles of Target last week. Of course I ended up in the book department. Oh, what 50 Shades has spawned! Row after row of bland yet suggestive black-and-white covers designed to mimic the 50 Shades packaging. Now that mainstream America (and the big New York publishers) have “discovered” erotica, we’ve got ourselves a full-blown deluge going on. I should check out WalMart. You know you’ve arrived when WalMart gives your book a prominent display. 50 Shades is also available at my local K-Mart, the one the Amish go to. Wonder what they think of this?

50 Shades of Plain Gray

“Throw me down the stairs the buggy whip. You like to be punished, ain’t?”

I look at Christian Stoltzfus and bite my lip vunst. He fills out that black broadcloth like one of those models in the English magazines, and he has the biggest hat around. His beard is black and thick. He smells like the tobacco he spent the day harvesting, with a touch of sweat from the horse that pulls the buggy. He makes me want to pull the buggy. Ain’t so!

Um … no. I don’t think Amish porn will be the next big thing.

Speaking fo WalMart, I was in one of the smaller (for WalMart) stores and noticed something interesting: they didn’t have any Harlequin books. Not a one. Not a Blaze or Temptation to be seen. I found this odd. Harlequin’s been a mainstay at the big box stores from the beginning. I wonder if it was just that store, or a new corporate policy? I’ll need to check out a couple other WalMarts and see what’s going on their book departments. Target and K-Mart, for the record, do carry Harlequins. We have a couple Mennonite-owned grocery stores in the area that have dodged the whole question by not carrying books at all, unless they’re inspirational. 50 Shades seems to be inspiring a whole lot of people. I wonder if that counts?

I’ve noticed over the last couple of years these same stores have really scaled back on their book departments, and not just by dumping Harlequin. Some stores had a wide variety of paperbacks, not just the bestseller of the week. Little by little the shelf space has been shrinking. This started long before the rise of ebooks and the invention of the Kindle, so you can’t blame it on technology. Are people not reading that much any more? Or at all? I wonder now if the scale back started with the rise of cable TV. We went from maybe 10 channels and a lot of books to 80+ channels (not counting digital) and fewer and fewer books. Coincidence?

I’ll tell you why I like books. No commercials. Since I’ve been unemployed (and rather than writing) I’ve been surfing cable a lot. Actually, I have been writing, during the commercial breaks. Might as well. There’s nothing else to do. I’ve tried to switch over to other shows. My findings: roughly 7 out of 10 channels go on commercial break at the same time, for roughly the same duration. I’ve had times where I’ve tried to check out five different shows and they’re all on simultaneous breaks. Sometimes the second show stays on break so long I end up going back to the first show, which has come back on in the meantime. More often, though, I just get fed up and turn off the set and go read a book. Books don’t go on commercial breaks. And they can all star Harrison Ford if you want them to. Hubba hubba!

Oops. I said no naked movie stars.

I hope print and book stores don’t go the way of the dinosaur, because I don’t want to end up having to buy my books from Amazon. Amazon doesn’t let you skim through the whole book to see if you want it. I’ve saved myself a lot of time and money “previewing” books at B&N. You can’t go by the first three chapters. Those are the ones we writers use to hook the publishers and agents, so we’re in top form for those. Once we’ve made the sale we can kick back and get lazy, and quality takes a nosedive. How many books have you read that started off with a bang, then petered out in the middle? In my case it’s because I’m a pantser. I know how it starts and I know how it ends. The middle, not so much. I should just call it the muddle.

There was this one SF author who used to write what I came to call “travelogues.” The whole book would be the characters essentially moving from Point A to Point B. You could read the first three chapters, skip the middle, read the last three chapters, and still get the gist of the book. In short, nothing at all of import happened in those middle chapters. To avoid that, I like to toss in a WTF moment right smack in the middle of my stories. Things like killing off the lead character, fun stuff like that. That way, if you try to skip around in my book, you won’t know what the hell’s going on. Don’t blame me, you’re the one who tried to take the easy way out. Serves you right.

This same author once had his protag crash a plane into a river. “Wonder if there’s a waterfall?” I mused. Yep, there was. Right on the very next page. This guy used to be on the bestseller lists on a regular basis. How? And no, it wasn’t Dan Brown. I actually liked The Da Vinci Code, though I had to wonder at that dead guy in the beginning, who spent five chapters worth of words setting up elaborate clues while mortally wounded. Couldn’t he have just written his killer’s name in blood on the wall, like a normal person? Maybe I watch too much TV.

Mmmm … naked TV stars … Okay, I’m done for the week.