In the startup world, it can be hard getting across what your company does—not least because in many cases what your company does may change. It’s called pivoting, and it happens a lot in smaller, newer ventures, as trial and error indicate wrong and right pathways.
In its previous incarnation, Zola Books never gained much recognition. It was established in 2011 by literary agent Joe Regal. It went live in 2013 and was part retailer, part publishing platform, part recommendation service, and pretty completely confusing.
Today, drop by the site, and you’ll see no books on display. Instead, Zola is introducing The Everywhere Store: it offers its e-commerce tools to authors, booksellers, and publishers, giving them the ability to sell any book on any web site. Regal says, “We have the full catalog from [major] publishers, we can sell any format, we have all types of different tools, like bulk sales, bundling.”
Zola works as a few lines of code, or a widget, on your site, and you can also send people directly to buy using social media links. Once Zola has paid the publisher for a book bought by a consumer, it splits the remainder 50-50 with you (minus credit card company fees). Zola can sell your book to those who click through at whatever markup you like.
It’s not as convenient for self-publishing authors, Regal says, because indies have to upload their books to Zola’s system. He hopes to make arrangements with Smashwords and other indie publishing companies to make self-published titles available without authors having to upload them. However, the split is better for self-publishers: they get 80 percent of the sale price, minus credit card fees, on ebooks. On print sales, indies get the 50-50 split on IngramSpark or CreateSpace books. Some examples of the numbers are here.
Zola provides another incentive that other major retailers don’t: the customer’s email address. Regal says, “That customer is yours.” Once the customer data is captured in a transaction, Zola passes that data to you.
In a test run with author Gregory David Roberts, Roberts offered a special-edition ebook copy of The Mountain Shadow (published in print by Grove) to buyers on his own site, giving them what Publishers Weekly’s Andrew Albanese said was a 24,000-word set of associated writings as an incentive to pay $1 extra for the ebook over the publisher’s price on other sites. At its best point, the promotion was accounting for up to 14 percent of all retail channel sales. Overall and over time, it has accounted for about 5 percent of all sales.
Another use: author Audrey Niffenegger has created a bookstore on her site, selling her own books as well as titles by others she has blurbed.
Bottom line: Zola’s The Everywhere Store is an extensive pivot, and with only about twelve partners so far, there’s a lot of road-testing to go. Regal concedes that it’s not for everyone; however, it does have the capacity to provide that e-commerce back-end for authors and others in a way that “blends in with your site’s look and feel,” the promotional material says. Per Regal: “Our intention is to empower all stakeholders to reach their readers.”
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
