I had a chance this last week to chat with a librarian, and I asked if she would mind if I wrote up some of what she had to say here at Mad Genius Club. So, with Amie’s permission, this is what a small public library faces in terms of ebooks and audiobooks.
I wrote an article here a few weeks ago about the change to Kindle Select’s ToS which allows Indie authors to distribute their books to public libraries through Overdrive. I mentioned this to Amie, and she was very interested, so we talked about some of the details I alluded to in that article, but didn’t know where things like pricing stood, since I haven’t worked as a librarian in over a decade. A traditionally published book, she told me, will cost somewhere between $50-$75 to license as an ebook, with a built-in number of check-outs before the license expires (meant to simulate how a paper book would fall apart and have to be repurchased). She told me that her library has a budget of $1500 annually for ebooks, and $500 of that is just the subscription fee to be part of the cooperative service where her library and several others in the region pool access. Which leaves her with $1000 a year to buy ebooks. Obviously, that doesn’t cover a lot of them at the list prices for traditionally published books. She tells me they do go on sale, and she’ll wait for sales down to $25 in most cases for buying books.
I asked about pricing for Indie authors, on their books, without the poison pill of expiration after a certain number of check-outs, and her face lit up. Yes, please do that, she told me. She would be able to stock her local authors’ ebooks for the patrons, and she would love to be able to to that, much more affordably. She agreed with me that pricing should be a little higher than we offer to a single buyer – instead of $5 for a novel, perhaps $10 to $15 for the library to license the book for checking it out to all their patrons who wanted it.
The other pain point, she told me, is audiobooks, which are very popular, and for her to license an audiobook is at least $80 and up. If Indies can bring in audiobooks at a lower price, they will sell them to smaller libraries. She and I talked a little about voicing using AI, which isn’t an ideal way to handle it, but I’ve been considering it as a way to raise the money to justify hiring a voice artist, otherwise that is simply out of reach for me. As it is for most Indie authors, I suspect. Pulling ourselves up by the bootstraps sometimes involves making do.
So! With this in mind, if you have books you want to keep in Kindle Select, but also want to be able to offer them to public libraries, you should have a better idea of pricing, and consider this: you are already very affordable. If you put books in libraries, you are tapping into a pool of readers who can potentially get hooked on your work and will go looking for it and find you on Amazon. Where instead of finding that your work costs an arm and a leg like the traditionally published authors they can only afford through the library, the reader can enjoy more of your work. In this economy? This can work.
How do you do this? There are a couple of options. Both Draft 2 Digital and Smashwords distribute to Overdrive. I will create a tutorial next week for uploading a book to D2D for distribution into Overdrive for libraries. There are other options, which I will state now I know nothing about, so please do your due diligence! PublishDrive, StreetLib, and Kobo all distribute into Overdrive as well. Again, as I wrote up in the previous article, you want to be very certain you are only pushing your book into Overdrive and thus to public libraries, or you will be in violation of your Kindle Select terms of service. If your books are not in KU, then you don’t have to worry about this.
Should you do this? That’s entirely up to you. I plan to put most if not all my books into the Overdrive system. Not only is it a new market of readers, it’s a way to support my local library, and in my town, my library is terrifically supportive of me and all the other authors who live here. So that’s a feel-good situation full of winning.
Mad Genius Club 
14 responses to “OverDrive for Library Books”
That’s fantastic. I imagine many of the authors who post to/follow this blog are aware of the ongoing fight in social media of “piracy is not theft” (it totally is, BTW). Uploading indie books to Overdrive will make them more available to the public and should weaken the pirates’ argument that they have limited access. I hope that will help decrease piracy.
You need the whole quote for it to really make sense.
“When buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t theft.”
Goose, gander; pot, kettle; etc. The people backing this movement (?) are completely for paying independent creators for their work.
We live in an age when there is DRM built into air filters.
Pirates will claim first that all writers are rich, and instantly when called on it, flip to claiming that writers who aren’t rich should quit writing.
They are in fact shameless liars.
Thanks Cedar! Saving this one for future use. I’m not trying to get rich, or even make a living, off my writing. I’m fortunate that my previous career provides me with that. Sounds like I have to get a lot more work published to make this work for me though.
I agree that when someone buys an ebook, they should own it free and clear. However, I have not seen any posters on X mention that issue. They have argued that copyright infringement is not theft. They have played the “hey, it’s free exposure and you will sell more books” card – I think that’s unlikely. If they mention this great book that they got for free to friends, what are the friends going to do? Go to the torrent website and do the same thing, yes?
Either way, it’s the author (who has invested time, energy, creativity and money for editing/cover design, etc.) who is left behind the eight ball. I think that, if possible, readers and authors should push back against the laws that say that purchasing isn’t owning.
Could you make an argument, rather than just assuming the conclusion you’ve already reached and treating it as established? Begging the question is a fallacy.
Also, you need to establish how your position is different in substance from:
and:
You have not supported your conclusion that people will all behave only in one way (phrasing it as a question doesn’t make it any less your conclusion, it just gives you passive-aggressive rhetorical cover).
You also need to establish how not giving money directly to authors in one case is bad, but is not bad in the other two.
I thought my points were reasonable rather than fallacious, as they were taken from multiple actual comments on social media… but here we go. In the case of options 2 and 3, the book has already been sold; the library purchased it, or a prior owner (I think it’s reasonable to assume that they, or someone, bought the book) donated/sold it to the used book store. So the author presumably got some money for it, therefore, not theft/piracy. Of course, any book with an expired copyright could not be claimed as an example of piracy (I mention this for clarification).
Granted, it’s possible that in option 1 the person to whom the book is recommended will buy it rather than pirate it as their friend did (again, this example taken from multiple posters on X). However, the writers who commented about the option 1 scenario overwhelmingly seem to feel that that isn’t happening, and I’m deferring to their experience.
I hope this is helpful.
You are free to think whatever you like, of course, but you were begging the question, which is a fallacy, just as in an earlier comment you were arguing against a straw man by not presenting the full quote “When buying is not owning, piracy is not theft” and only quoting the latter part of the phrase.
I’m curious, how do you think books get pirated without any purchase taking place? Mind you, I’m not arguing for piracy, but your new position is untenable because a pirated book still had to be purchased at some point, just as a library purchases books that are then borrowed, or a used book was purchased in the first place before being resold. In all three cases, the author got some money for it. And yet, only one is bad. You have still failed to differentiate in a substantive way.
It’s nice that you concede a possibility you did not even acknowledge before. But instead of making an argument in principle, you appeal to authority (another fallacy) rather than clarifying your position or improving your argument.
Appealing to authors in matters of copyright and piracy is not absurd, of course. Authors naturally have a stake in the matter. But authors also can be misled, lied to, fooled, or mistaken, as can anybody else, however much authority they possess or how invested they are in a matter.
I know an author who had a bestseller in the 2000s, whose publisher refused to buy the sequel, because the first book had been “pirated too much”. His rage against piracy can be imagined, and yet, it happened before ebook readers were at all common, and his book was a bestseller, meaning it made money, and it never occurred to him to ask if his publisher gave him an excuse rather than the actual reason for his “firing”. My own opinion on the matter is that his publisher learned of his political leanings and broke ties on that alone, while giving an excuse that would turn the author’s enmity elsewhere (and it worked). (The bestseller was also optioned by a Hollywood producer for a hefty amount of money; which the Publisher got half of, making the cutting loose of the author make even less sense if the reason was monetary as claimed.) In TradPub, not being an avowed socialist was and is a good way to get silently blacklisted. But if you were to ask him, he would maintain that piracy is why he had to get the sequel published by another publisher (one that was still open to libertarian-leaning authors for about a year after they published that sequel).
It’s also fairly well known that every copyright extension in US history was championed by at least some authors, with the possible exception of the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act. If one relied exclusively on their authority, then one could not possibly argue against the current situation where everything remains in copyright for most of a century. Assuming, of course, that authors are the ultimate authority in the matter, and cannot possibly be wrong.
There’s always “buy the ebook and return it as soon as pirated.”
Which is why Amazon removed the download option.
THERE is a fair point.
[…] HOW INDIE WRITERS CAN GET EBOOKS IN LIBRARIES: OverDrive for Library Books. […]
Sarah’s assistant Holly put a post on Sarah’s blog with detailed instructions for how to get libraries to order paper copies of No Man’s Land. I followed those instructions the next day at my local library, one branch of a library system that serves a city of half a million people. The official response from the central library office, a few days later, was that this book did not have enough “professional reviews” for them to consider ordering it.
My first reaction was, “of course not, it was only published last week.” But then I realized that tradpub would also have had that problem, and they solved it with ARCs (and now eARCs, presumably). Which leads to questions:
Are there workarounds for a lack of “professional reviews”?
What constitutes a “professional review”?
How does tradpub (now, today) get “professional reviews” for new books?
How can an indy author on her own, without the clout of (say) Randy Penguin behind her, get “professional reviews”?
How does one become a “professional reviewer”? Is this a business opportunity for an indy writer, or a small press, or a consortium of small presses?
Kirkus is considered a professional review. You ask to be reviewed, upload a manuscript and payment, and get your review that you can either keep to yourself, or use for PR. They do not guarantee a good review. https://www.kirkusreviews.com/indie-reviews/
They are up front that they are a pay-to-play operation.
I’m not familiar with how to get journals, newspapers, and other professional publications to review your book. I know for nonfiction, your publisher submits it to academic journals and gets on the list. (I have been a reviewer, and a reviewee, in academic journals.)