Zola builds custom sites for authors. Joan Didion, for instance.

August 3, 2016August 5, 2016 Michael Strong 1 Comment

Plenty of authors with successful track records and a devoted audience have a website that is hopelessly out of date (or perhaps even non-existent).

We can fix that for you. We’ll make you a custom, modern website, built to work on mobile devices and SEO-optimized. Designed to showcase your work, your new site includes a buy button for your books so that readers can purchase the books they love directly from you.

Joan Didion’s agents at Janklow & Nesbit were happy:

And of course it is a responsive site that looks good on any browser, any phone.

Cool, right?

Eric Reis delivered nearly 10,000 copies of The Leader’s Guide (his record-breaking Kickstarter book) using The Everywhere Store

July 28, 2016August 3, 2016 Michael Strong Leave a comment

Eric Reis wrote The Lean Startup in 2011. It has become a touchpoint for startups around the world – so popular, in fact, that fans wanted another book from Reis, one which would help leaders to apply Lean Startup principles at their companies. So Reis set up a Kickstarter campaign, and it was the most successful Kickstarter for a book ever, raising well over $500,000 from nearly 10,000 backers.

When all those backers needed their ebooks delivered, Reis turned to Zola to fulfill. And fulfill we did! Thousands of backers have downloaded The Leader’s Guide ebook, which can be read on any device.

Zola can sell or fulfill titles that are protected by DRM (Digital Rights Management), or SDRM (Social DRM). Reis chose SDRM so that his fans could read The Leader’s Guide on any device.

SDRM also allows readers to share ebooks with their friends. Zola’s SDRM features a picture of the author, reminding readers of the fundamental relationship between author and reader, politely dissuading folks from inappropriately sharing their work.

Zola’s SDRM uses proprietary encrypted watermarking technology so that if a copy of an SDRM title shows up on a bittorrent site or is otherwise inappropriately posted, we can identify the bad actor whose copy was shared.

We’d be happy to sell or fulfill your title, too. Contact [email protected]

The Everywhere Store looks great on your site. Because you can customize it, easily.

June 29, 2016June 29, 2016 Michael Strong Leave a comment

The Everywhere Store™ allows anybody to sell any book on any website.

But will it look good on your website? Yes. Because you have control over the colors and buttons. You decide what it should look like.

Unlike affiliate links to Amazon or Barnes and Noble or IndieBound, with The Everywhere Store™, the customer never leaves your website. You ARE, from the customer’s point of view, the retailer. So your customer stays your customer. On your site. Closer to you. Right where you want them. And where they want to be!

See how it matches the background on Gregory David Roberts’ site for The Mountain Shadow ebook?

The colors match, the buttons match. The language is exactly what Greg specified. All under his control. Easy to change, too, using the dashboard.

And your site will look great on phones, of course.

Zola Books Technology Platform – It’s Awesome

June 22, 2016June 22, 2016 Michael Strong 1 Comment

Zola is a software technology company focused on books. We support both discovery (through Recommendations) and transactions (through The Everywhere Store™).

That sounds simple enough – but the platform we built to support those businesses is actually quite large. It needs to be, to make any book available on any website in any format.

Among other things, we ingest, on a daily basis, metadata and files for the millions of existing (and new, and newly released) ebooks, audiobooks and print titles from all the publishers in the US.

We “concord” all that data with our concordance engine, “build” ebooks that are encrypted by DRM (or not, depending on your preference – and yes we make .mobi and .epub formats for you tech dorks that are wondering), and enable their sale through The Everywhere Store™ – which, yes, can be white labeled, along with our iOS and Android reading apps (which, btw, also support audio files. Yes, audio and ebooks in the same app.) That also means, of course, securely supporting credit card transactions, embedding recommendations, capturing email addresses, providing analytics, heat maps, and other services to help you sell your books.

So many services, in fact, that they barely fit on this chart:

We’ll talk more about all our technology services in coming posts. For now it’s enough just to see all the parts on a single page.

Nice going, team!

You can sell signed copies through The Everywhere Store

April 13, 2016April 28, 2016 Michael Strong Leave a comment

We’re always working on improving The Everywhere Store. Last week we made the widget faster – about 30% faster. Nice going, developers!

We’ve also been asked recently by several clients to make it possible for them to sell signed print copies of their books and handle fulfillment themselves. So now, in addition to making it possible for anyone to sell any book in any format, we can handle the sale of autographed print books as well, enabling writers to sell autographed editions, or rare editions, or sometimes something even more special….

…Like the book Chandler Burr has created.

Chandler has been writing about perfume for years – as the first ever Scent Critic for the New York Times, author of The Emperor of Scent, and perhaps most importantly, as the curator of the groundbreaking show “The Art of Scent 1889-2012,” which debuted at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City.

Chandler personally designed and commissioned an extraordinary catalogue, which is more than a book: it includes vials of a dozen of the world’s greatest scents. He is using The Everywhere Store to sell signed collector’s editions of the catalog directly.

Chandler’s book is particularly special, but as with every feature of The Everywhere Store, anyone can use it to sell any book anywhere, and we’re looking forward to seeing other authors sell signed copies of their print books and more in the near future!

Zola Books Closes Follow-On Round – Total Investment to Date $8.5 Million

March 9, 2016March 9, 2016 Michael Strong Leave a comment

Zola closed a follow-on round of financing last week. The round was led by Charles Dolan, founder of Cablevision and HBO, who also led the initial round of financing that Zola raised in late 2013; the round takes the total investment in Zola to $8.5 million.

“This investment really validates the potential of The Everywhere Store widget. It shows the power of enabling anyone anywhere to sell any book online.” – CEO Joe Regal

The additional financing comes after our launch of its “Everywhere Store” widget on a website featuring The Mountain Shadow by Gregory David Roberts, the sequel to his international bestseller Shantaram, which has sold more than 4 million copies. Visitors to http://www.themountainshadowebook.com can buy The Mountain Shadow in both print and electronic editions directly from that website using The Everywhere Store widget. Though the ebook is available through other retailers, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple, Google, and Kobo, The Everywhere Store alone accounted for 8% of overall sales.

Unlike other start-ups in the book space, Zola has been able to acquire the complete catalog of all major publishers, including the “Big 5” – Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette, Simon & Schuster, and Macmillan. Our catalog allows us to enable the retail of new works by “traditionally published” authors as well as self-published authors, making it possible for any website (including independent bookseller sites, author sites, and media sites) to sell a complete range of trade books. According to Statista.com, the book publishing market in the United States accounts for approximately $29 billion in annual revenue, of which roughly half is generated by trade books.

Zola Books is based in New York City. Its technology products enable book discovery and retail across the web. Its best-in-class recommendation engine, Bookish Recommends, is being used by more than a dozen libraries throughout North America; it launched its mobile ecommerce widget, The Everywhere Store, in October 2015. Zola acquired Bookish Recommends in 2014 from Bookish LLC, a venture founded by three of the then-“Big 6” publishers, including Penguin, Simon & Schuster, and Hachette, for an undisclosed sum.

Ebook Bundling with The Everywhere Store

November 30, 2015 Michael Strong Leave a comment

Ebooks are incredibly convenient; having a huge library with you wherever you go can be a lifesaver if you’re a commuter, or when you’re on a longer trip and want to take a bunch of books, or even just when you’re unexpectedly stuck in a long line with nothing to do. But that convenience doesn’t totally replace the sensual pleasure of holding a physical book in your hands, and of having an object that reminds you of the experience of reading that book once you’re done.

The ideal solution would be to have both the print book AND the ebook – convenience and permanence at the same time. Publishers have been seeking a way to provide that solution for quite a while; it’s called “bundling.” But no one has really been able to offer it to readers.

Until now. Bundling is something you can do through The Everywhere Store, and we’re launching it today.

For Cyber Monday, The Mountain Shadow Author’s Edition ebook is FREE with purchase of the Hardcover at our normal discounted price of $24.95.

The list price for the print edition is $32.50, and the price for the Author’s Edition ebook is $14.99, so that’s nearly a 50% discount. And you get both the convenience of the ebook and the pleasure of print materiality at the click of one button.

When customers buy the ebook, they can download it immediately onto their Kindle, Apple, or Android device – or any other computer, phone, or tablet, for that matter. Because we have a partnership with Ingram, customers will get the print title shipped to their home.

Bundle: Done!

Click here if you want to try our inaugural bundle for yourself.

BONUS: The Author’s Edition ebook includes photos of the author’s studio, amazingly detailed outlines of the novel; multiple drafts of the key 1^st chapter, an epic Q & A with the author, and love poetry between characters in The Mountain Shadow – among other things. Gotta have it!

Introducing The Everywhere Store

November 10, 2015November 10, 2015 Joe Regal Leave a comment

We’ve talked about the pressing need for diversity in the world of book retail, and we’ve talked about our new technology that enables anyone anywhere to sell any book from their website. Now we’re very pleased to announce the public launch of the Everywhere Store technology with a bestselling book by an acclaimed author: The Mountain Shadow by Gregory David Roberts.

(more…)

Make More Money With The Everywhere Store

October 15, 2015 Michael Strong 1 Comment

So – how much more money do you make with The Everywhere Store?

There are three scenarios:

Traditionally published author
Self-published author
The Special Case

We’ll talk about the Special Case next week. For now, let’s focus on self and traditionally published.

Let’s say you’re traditionally published by a Big Five publisher (e.g., Random House) and your ebook is priced at $9.99. For every ebook you sell through other retailers, the retailer takes 30% of the $9.99, leaving your publisher a “net” of $6.99. The publisher then passes on (in almost all cases) 25% of that $6.99 to you the author.

Do the math: 25% of $6.99 is $1.75. So you typically get about $1.75 for every ebook you sell.

What happens when you sell with The Everywhere Store? Well, of course using The Everywhere Store doesn’t change your relationship with your publisher. What changes with The Everywhere Store is your cut of the retail portion. Instead of giving up 30% off the top, you – the author – get half of the retailer’s cut. That’s in addition to what your publisher pays you.

The Everywhere Store is an ebook retailer just like Amazon or Barnes & Noble or Google or Kobo. We have all the ebooks from all the publishers, so we are a retailer, just like them – but the difference is that we split the retailer’s net with you.

Let’s do the math: the retailer’s 30% of $9.99 is $2.99. We split that retail portion with you 50-50, after credit card fees. So if we round the credit card fee to $0.50 per $9.99 title, that leaves $2.50 for us to split. That’s $1.25 for you.

So with The Everywhere Store you get to add $1.25 per ebook sale to the $1.75 you get from your publisher. That’s over 70% more cash in your pocket per ebook. Instead of $1.75 , you’re making $3.00 per sale. That kind of cabbage adds up.

But wait, what if you are self-published?

That’s even better. We split it 80-20. Let’s do the math again.

Let’s say you are self-publishing your ebook. You price it at $9.99 on The Everywhere Store. Round the credit card fee to $0.50 again, and that leaves $9.50 to split.

Do the math: 80% of $9.50 is $7.60. The relevant comparison point is what you’d earn on, say, Kindle Direct Publishing, which maxes out at 70% of $9.99, or $6.99 per sale. With the Everywhere Store, self-published writers can make another $0.60 per sale, which is another 8.6% in your pocket per ebook sold.

Bonus notes:

These percentages apply to any price over $0.99 – so you can sell your title for $0.99 or $1.49 or $9.99 or $13.99 or $25.99 or any other price over 99 cents and walk away with 80% of the retail price (after credit card fees) in your wallet.
You get the customer’s email address. (More on that soon.)

Next week: The Special Case