What in the world do I mean books were produce? Well, they have been. And before you go shouting at me because I just insulted your golden book and said it was a banana, let me try to explain what I mean.
For a long time, since about the time of the First World War, the release of a book has been treated as an event. The book would have a set release date, and all the push and promotion would be aimed at selling as many copies as possible in the first week or few weeks of the release date. (Bestseller lists are built on velocity of sales, meaning how many books sell in one week, not how many books have sold overall.)
For a number of decades up until the 1960s, with a moderate number of books being produced, this never really caused many problems. Authors’ backlists stayed in print and readers could find new copies of books to buy long after their release date.
Then about thirty plus years ago this started to change until finally the book as event reached seriously large status with the release of the last three Harry Potter books.
In the last twenty years, publishers with computer tracking and stores with computer tracking took the importance of book as event a little too far. Books that were what are called “Word of Mouth” books, or slow builds, never really stood a chance in this thinking. If you didn’t find a book in the first week or the first month, look in a used bookstore or lately in a used store online to find it. Because no regular store would still have it.
And author backlists were a thing of the past unless you were a brand name bestseller.
YOUR BOOK IS PRODUCE IN TRADITIONAL PUBLISHING
Now, understand, in a grocery store, produce is put out to be sold quickly and then is replaced before it spoils.
Over the last twenty plus years publishers and bookstores put out books and then yanked them quickly as if a book would spoil in a week or two. They treated books exactly the same as produce. And guess what, just as with produce in a grocery story, if a book didn’t sell, it was tossed away, destroyed.
This practice has become so bad that often a book will be deemed out of print within a month of the release date because it didn’t have the orders the sales force was expecting. Or it didn’t have the number of projected sales in the first week or so. Of course, it won’t officially go out of print until all the warehouse stock is gone, but it will have a do-not-reprint order on the book from almost week one.
But the one thing modern publishers and big bookstore have forgotten:
Books don’t spoil.
So why exactly did this mentality come about? Shelf space and a huge number of books being produced, that’s why. To meet their bottom lines and pay the huge overhead of New York, publishers have to churn out a lot of books. And for decades the number of books being published has gone up.
And that shelf space in stores has become a premium, paid for by publishers with a lot of extra money being paid if a store will just put the book near the front door for a few days. Or on the shelf end cap. All common and all focused on the idea that a book has a very, very short life.
But books don’t spoil.
And readers don’t read under pressure.
—Often a reader will find an author’s book in a used store years and years after it was first published and then want more of that author’s work.
—Often a book or a series will have a slow build. It takes time for word-of-mouth on a series or a book to be spread, which used to be the top way a book would build to a bestseller list before twenty years ago. But with publishers thinking of books as produce, by the time a word-of-mouth build can happen, the readers can’t find the book. It’s out of print if it didn’t sell well. And it certainly isn’t taking up any shelf space in a bookstore, so even if it is in print, a reader has to special order it.
For example, Bantam Books put my wife’s 4th book of her popular Fey series out of print almost instantly, yet continued to publish #5-7 over the next three years. And of course, readers blamed Kris for not being able to find the 4th book in the series. Stupid on Bantam’s part, since the series was growing, but the company killed it. No logical reason other than thinking that books were produce and #4 didn’t hit some unknown number somewhere in some computer.
(Note: Great news. Kris again controls the rights to all seven of the Fey books and WMG Publishing will be reissuing them in both electronic format and trade paper editions right up to the day that Kris releases the new 8th book of the Fey, the first book in the Places of Power series next summer. Thats right, all seven of the Fey books and a new one will all be available at the same time. That has all of us Fey fans excited. Watch her site for details.)
What Has Changed in this New World of Publishing?
For New York traditional publishing, nothing at all has changed. Nothing.
Let me say that again. Nothing. The way I described books being treated two years ago is how a book is treated today and there isn’t a thing an author can do to change that if you sell your book to New York traditional publishing.
But then from seemingly out of the blue comes this wonderful new world of electronic publishing and easy and cheap print-on-demand publishing that anyone can now access. But that alone would not have been enough to make any real changes. Writers have been able to publish their own books for decades.
The big change is with the readers and the electronics available to the readers. With Kindles and iPads and the other epub book devices and smart phones, readers in this new world are quickly becoming used to getting a book NOW!
If a reader hears of a new author they want to read, or finish a book they liked by an author, they go to their computer or their Kindle or their iPad or their smart phone and look to see what the author has available. And if it happens to be a book in the same series they liked, they buy it instantly for their Kindle or iPad or Sony Reader or order they order it at once over Amazon.com and other places in the paper format to be delivered in a day or so.
Readers who never ever thought of books as produce are now being allowed to find authors and books easier with this new world of electronic communication and reading. And that’s what has changed.
Wow, as you might imagine, this is this messing with the minds of the fine and fairly smart folks in traditional publishing. When you have had all your focus, your entire business model built on selling produce, changing to selling something that doesn’t ever spoil is difficult to imagine at best.
Changing any large business model is difficult. Changing it fast is almost impossible.
And right now the changes are happening so fast, it’s hard for just about anyone to keep up. But the problem is that the changes are NOT happening inside of publishing. They are happening outside of publishing, in the distribution and electronics world. And there lies the problem. It’s the readers who have suddenly forced this change.
I call large publishers huge cruise ships, cutting through the sea at top speed. They have only had to make minor course corrections for almost one hundred years now. Suddenly there are all kinds of problems ahead and big ships at full speed do not change course quickly. This thinking of books as produce is the main reason they cannot change quickly.
Everything they do, their deadlines, their sales force, their printing schedules, their promotion, their warehousing, everything is set to having a book hit suddenly and then vanish, to be replaced by another and another and another.
This is called the “churn” in the publishing business.
It’s this “churn” of one book after another that makes a publisher money in the margin. It is how every single aspect of their companies are set up. Their business model is set on the churn.
Now comes electronic publishing and reading into this mix and churn doesn’t work. Books don’t spoil. But traditional publishers can’t imagine a business model without the churn, so for the longest time, traditional publishers have fought to do one of two things.
1) Keep the books they are publishing out of electronic versions to preserve the value of their more expensive hardbacks.
2) Delay or price very high the electronic books to also not compete against their hardbacks.
In essence, they have been treating electronic books just like their paper produce books. And that thinking is just flat wrong, which is why so many smart people are saying that traditional publishing is in trouble.
Books don’t spoil.
Over the last six months, traditional publishing is losing both fights. Readers are just flat demanding the books either be reasonably priced or they are not going to buy them.
So that rebellion by readers causes another set of problems inside traditional publishing. The readers won’t buy expensive electronic books, so the feedback loop in traditional publishing is that electronic books don’t sell well.
And the authors who see the minor royalties from electronic books on their statements coming through from their publisher or from silly places like Fictionwise say that electronic books aren’t worth the fight. And thus authors who are steeped in the traditional publishing route think all this electronic publishing is just all hype and are ignoring it.
To those inside traditional publishing, the data (the sacred sales number) just isn’t there yet because they still think that every book is produce, thus it must be priced high to return the correct investment over the correct time.
But take out the time factor (the produce factor) and the accounting becomes different, very different. Instead of saying a book must make back its entire investment in two months, imagine accounting that says a book can earn money for twenty years, growing in sales every year.
A completely different business model.
So if you wonder why you don’t see quicker movement on all this from New York and why New York published electronic books are often priced over $9.99, now you know. There is a nasty feedback loop working for them at the moment.
And so to a degree, I believe that traditional New York publishing is going to have a very bumpy road in the next few years and that many of the large ships of publishing aren’t even trying to turn yet. Oh, oh… They all won’t hit icebergs and go down as some are saying, but there is going to be a lot of damage as the old produce model is replaced slowly.
Books don’t spoil.
So what’s happening outside of traditional publishing?
Basically, a huge wave is happening. Many, many authors are figuring this new model out. Many, many small publishers are figuring this out, publishers who can turn their ships quickly. Many small publishers are springing into life to fill this void with a new business model and help writers.
I have almost 150 SOLD short stories and my wife has a bunch more than that. What has happened to these stories in the past? They were treated like produce, of course. They were published in a certain issue of a magazine or an anthology and then the book or magazine issue became a relic sitting on a dusty shelf. The story, which was not produce, was basically for all intents and purposes, gone, inside a product thought of as produce.
Notice, I just brought back from the dead a number of my stories here on my web site and electronically through the new start-up company WMG Publishing. Kris is doing the same. Stories not seen outside of a used bookstore in decades are now coming to a brand new group of readers.
Is this good for authors? Oh, my, what a stupid question I just asked, huh? This is a gold mine for authors. Readers can now find my work, not just the new stuff that’s out this week, but all my work. By this time next year I hope to have every story I still think is worthwhile up and available. Stories that have not earned me a penny in twenty years are now earning regular money.
And I am finding new readers.
I will also republish a bunch of my novels. And Kris is doing the same. As I said earlier, not only can all the fans of the Fey books get them this fall and winter in both electronic and trade paper editions, but it is now worthwhile for Kris, after over a decade, to finally write the next three Fey novels, the Places of Power series. Without this new world of reader-driven publishing, no New York traditional produce publisher would touch the series because to them it had already spoiled and been tossed away.
But then, traditional New York publishers have been ignoring how readers really read and find book and new authors and new series for decades now. To readers, books were never produce. They were always something to be found and discovered and read when the time was right for the reader.
Electronic publishing and the new model for smaller publishers is finally treating books like readers want them to be treated. Readers need to be able to find any book they want at any time of the day or night.
Books are not produce to be tossed away because they didn’t sell quickly enough. And finally the New World of Publishing allows that to happen.
And as an old time writer, I haven’t been this excited in thirty years about writing new stuff. It’s a great time to be a writer. Finally our work will no longer be treated as produce and any reader who wants to find a story will be able to find it. Even twenty or thirty years from now.
And eventually, after a lot of turmoil, New York traditional publishing will be forced to change its business model and realize one simple fact:
Books don’t spoil.
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Copyright 2010 Dean Wesley Smith
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Because of the new world and technology, my magic bakery full of my writing got a lot more valuable lately and this article is now part of the inventory of that bakery.
If you feel this helped you in any way, toss a tip into the tip jar on the way out of the Magic Bakery.
Even if you can’t afford to donate, please feel free to pass this along to others who might get some help from it.
Thanks, Dean
Okay, so this brings up a couple questions/comments for me, Dean:
1) Isn’t one of the reasons that we have the whole problem with books being treated like produce because of the the Thor Power Tool ruling in ’70′s? I know publishers move slow but I would think that there’d be somebody going, “Hey, we just got a chance to get rid of some of the stupidity. Woohoo!”
2) It’s great to hear that Kris wil be releasing more of the Fey books along with more of her Kristine Greyson books (she’s got a lot of books coming out in the next little while). As you mentioned in the blog post, it’s amazing how much more control authors are gaining because of electronic publishing. I’m looking forward to authors putting series that I loved in the past back into print and/or writing sequels.
Which leads me to my last question:
3) Any similar news on when your novels will be released and which ones they might be?
Steve, actually the Thor Power Tool ruling was mostly hype in the author world. It had an impact, sure, on inventory, but the publishers finished with the problem in one year and it blipped past, but for some reason remained mythic in the industry. It’s a tax issue and doesn’t apply at all to electronics. It applied to how suppliers were handling inventory prior to that time. No big deal now.
Yup, Kris is just having a blast, and her fans of many of her series are getting excited. The Smokey Dalton books will make it back out finally next spring as well and there’s a chance for a new Smokey novel next fall.
As for my own stuff, I’ve got a really fun and kind of silly Poker Boy novel called The Slots of Saturn which will be first up, brand new novel this winter some time. More Poker Boy novels and stories to follow. Then I have the origin book next spring in a big new thriller series under the name Dean Edwards called Dead Money and that’s set in the world of professional poker and gambling. Brand new as well. That series will have new books every year depending on how it does. I’ll bring out a few of my earlier reprint novels along the way as well, my first novel and including a fun and short erotic golf thriller called Bump and Run. Yup, not kidding, an erotic golf thriller that came out a decade ago under the name Edward Taft. Silly but fun. Thanks for asking. But to be honest, it’s Kris’s series that have me the most excited. I’ve been waiting a long time for that new Fey novel.
Excellent metaphor.
I have to wonder, though, if print runs don’t contribute to this thinking? Storage costs money, and that affects the profit curve over time. POD might make that thinking obsolete.
POD is helping some traditional publishers, PV, but not in many ways because of the nature of scale. They also have union contracts with the shippers and warehouses and major contracts with the big web presses that are hard to break, even if they wanted to. Remember, they are working on the churn, the mass scale to make the overhead for those huge buildings. No POD could handle it. But a future model might be that each publisher sets up their own POD press for their own books. That might be a business model that would help them.
Digital distribution also introduces an interesting problem. I can only read so many books during the course of my life. Up until now, my choice has been limited to the books available to me – which are generally those that are new and available in bookshops. This keeps the current model going and constantly injects new fresh blood into the system.
Digital distribution looks like it will provide me with an almost infinite library. I probably never need to read a “new” book again because, chances are, within the corpus of existing books there will be an essentially limitless supply of excellent and interesting books that I haven’t read.
Do I buy new books out of habit or because those are what is available to me? Will future readers do the same thing – or will they be more likely to read existing works with excellent reputations? What impact will unrestricted access to old works have on the readership of new works?
Perhaps I’m less likely to read a greater variety of authors because I can simply dig down into the back catalog of the first few that I like. A natural instinct when we find an author we like is to read everything that author has written. I read reasonably quickly, but it would probably take me several years to get through the collected works of my favorite ten authors. I have everything of Pratchett’s and that would take at least a year to get through. I have everything of Stackpole’s, having just gotten into BattleTech when he published Warrier:En Guarde. That’s now a pretty sizable catalog and would take a substantial amount of time to go through as well. How long to get through all of Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein back catalog? Even the most dedicated reader is probably looking at more than a year or two.
Will ubiquitous availability fragment author’s audiences? That because there will be so many options for the reader, that fewer writers will attract enough unique readers to make a career of it and that “active” writers will be competing for eyeballs with the entire back catalogs of writers who are no longer with us.
Interesting times indeed.
Orin, that is an interesting problem for readers to face, of that there is no doubt. Too much to read, but honestly, that’s been the problem since the late 1960s. Back before then a person could read every science fiction book put out, or every mystery. We lost that as the pace increased into the early 1970s and now if you don’t hit a bookstore, a major bookstore twice a week, you won’t even begin to see the books New York is pushing, let alone the ones they aren’t. So this new way of publishing just buys readers time. And helps authors whose books deserve an audience to find one.
Funny thing, this modern newfangled technology is, in a lot of ways, taking publishing back to what it used to be “back in the day.”
Short stories can find a market again. “Pulp” fiction can find a market again. Mid-list authors have a market once more. It goes on and on. Who knows? Maybe something akin to dime novels or even penny dreadfuls will make a comeback.
There’s the old saying: What’s old is new again.
Seems to be the case today for publishing.
Ty, sort of, but not really. In the Pulp days, the drugstore racks were full of the new pulp magazines and they would last for a week or maybe a month and then be gone, replaced. Some of those stories are finding new light again because pulp reproduction houses are bringing out entire issues of magazines that now maybe on ten known copies exist. You have a pulp magazine that is one of ten in the country and is worth thousands as a collectors item and trust me, you are not reading the stories in it. (grin) Now those are seeing the light again. Most are not helping the author at all due to copyright issues, but at least they are seeing light again.
This new world is different in that nothing leaves once up electronically. It’s just up. Even in the first golden age (this is the second) there were pull dates and expire dates on the pulps and paperbacks and before that the Dime Novels and so on.
One of the reasons I started purchasing from online booksellers.
Books don’t spoil at the reader’s end, either. I’ve got old pbacks I’ve been collecting since high school (50+ years). They’ll eventually deteriorate, so I keep a sharp eye out for ebooks to replace them.
With several layers of computer backup, my library is a lot safer — and I don’t need as much bookshelf space, either.
Books as produce, and you have a magic bakery.
Are you hungry when you type up your posts? 
As one exception that proves the rule you are talking about, now that Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire books are selling so well, the publishers has put her two previous (unrelated) series back in print.
Thanks for the great information, Dean!
Yup, Deborah, some authors are lucky to have books reprinted. Most, like 99.9% it never happens.
Until this new world came along and slammed into the side of publishing. Now authors control what gets reprinted, not publishers.
“To readers, books were never produce.”
As an avid reader, I totally agree. It always frustrated me when I’d discover an author I liked, and then find out I couldn’t buy his or her other books because they’d gone out-of-print. Or their series would get dropped before it finished.
Treating books like tomatoes drove me nuts–the rise of online bookstores helped some, but the coming rise of epub makes me even happier as a reader.
On the other hand, as a writer I find myself lying awake at night thinking about reversion clauses in traditional publishing contracts. And how the stakes in reversion negotiations for a stand-alone book may be different than for a book that is the beginning of a series.
L.M., reversion clauses are the most important clause in contracts now with New York. If you aren’t careful with that clause, they could stop publishing your book for all intents and purposes and yet never give it back to you. So you are correct to lay away and worry about those clauses. And most authors don’t even know what they are signing and what it means to them in ten years. And all lower level agents and slush reading agents don’t know either and don’t care so can’t help you.
Books as produce; great analogy.
Tangential to the discussion, but…When I worked at a chain bookstore, we stripped tons of mass market paperbacks after they had been on the shelf for some period of time. Mailed back the covers but trashed the rest of the book. It made no sense to me when I was a book clerk doing the work, and it still makes no sense to me now, esp with all the assorted paper-saving initiatives and ‘going green’ efforts around nowadays.
And you’re right. When I want to read an author’s backlist, it’s come to the point where I can almost just go to the local used bookstore to find it because I’ve had no luck finding or ordering other author’s backlists from Borders or Barnes and Noble. I’d rather give money to the author somehow than buy used, but often buying used is the only possibility to read someone’s stuff.
I haven’t bought into the e-readers yet; though I’m keeping an eye on the techology and waiting to see how it shakes out a bit before making a choice.
I hope one of your articles will be on the differences between an established writer (such as yourself or Kris) and newer writers with few or no publications as far as benefitting from electronic publishing.
Jim, I also have been stunned at the green movement ignoring the huge waste in this business. Of every paperback in a chain store, half of them will be destroyed in about a month. Every book New York traditional publishing sells must carry the cost of production, shipping, and warehousing of a second book. Another reason they are in deep trouble. The price points readers are willing to pay is nearing the place where readers just won’t pay it, especially with cheaper electronic editions.
Fantastic post, Dean. Now I have something new to tell writers who are too locked into the old model of thinking: Don’t let your book be a banana.
What’s fascinating about all this are the number of delusional writers on both sides. There’s the self-publishing folks who think traditional publishing is evil and think there’s no value in going that route on one side, and on the other you have a lot of traditionally published authors who still can’t get over the stigma they’ve always attached to self-publishing. The truth is, if we’re serious about building an audience, all options are open. We just have to be aware of the choices we’re making and why. How much control over the process are we willing to cede versus what do we gain? Every writer needs to be asking that question with every book and story now.
Scott, you are going the way I think most writers should go, which is both ways. Congrats on the new sale to Simon and Schuster by the way. I agree completely that to build audience you are better off going both ways, both traditional and through smaller publishers electronically.
Control is a big issue and many beginning writers don’t understand that you have a lot of control even selling a book to New York. You can’t go in and tell them what cover to use or where to sell it and how many copies, since that’s why you have gone in partnership with them, so they do those things. But it is still your book, and if a publisher starts down a wrong road, killing a contract and paying back the money is always an option. And also being careful what you sign in the contract, when you get the book back, and so on, are critical.
So I agree, Scott, a balanced approach is a good plan at the moment, and looks to be for a distant future.
Part of the equation with out-of-print books in the traditional publishing model also has to do with the tipping point at which a books is/isn’t profitable for a publisher to keep in print.
I’m not a bestseller, but Tor Books, for example, kept a book of mine in print for 8 years. Finally, although there were still some sales each year, sales had dropped to a point where, fiscally, it would have been a losing proposition to keep paying for warehousing (let alone to pay for going back to print); not enough copies were selling to make it viable, in terms of the per-unit cost/profit ratio, to keep the book in print.
Conversely, I know any number of writers who, after becoming bestsellers with much bigger audiences than they’d had when they wrote their early books, were then able to turn around and re-sell their out-of-print early books to their new houses for MORE money than they’d originally sold them as new books when they were obscure midlisters. Those books went out of print under the per-unit cost/profit ratio caluclations of their careers at less stellar stages, but now it’s antcipated that those books will sell enough copies (via the larger audience the author has as a bestseller now) to be more profitable in the -second- life than they were in their first.
This is also part of why backlist gets repackaged. A book that’s been steadily in print for 5-10 years will get a packaging facelift in anticipate of the bestselling author’s audience continuing to increase, so the old books keep getting repackaged to look up to date for all the readers out there who will buy this title in the -next- 5-10 years. (Until/unless a book has packaging so classic that the publisher feels no reprint is needed. My dad had a book that stayed in print for about 20 years without ever getting a facelift, possibly because its wonderful Michael Whelan cover -always- looked fresh, regardless of the year.)
By contrast to all that, though, an e-book, which has no physical costs (it doesn’t have to be warehoused, shipped, stripped, pulped, or reprinted) is a means of packaging content that eliminates most of the per-unit cost/profit calculations that determine the lifespan of a -physical- book “product.” Which has a lot to do with why there’s such a long and ongoing battle over reversion clauses RE e-rights. Unlike a physical book, there’s not a low-sales point at which it makes no sense at all for the publisher to retain rights; so they’d like to retain rights forevever to e-rights.
Meanwhile, whereas it doesn’t make much fiscal sense for an author to self-publish a print book to sell 200 copies per year (the high cost of a print copy, as well as the difficulties of distribution, make that a rather expensive hobby), it can cost as little a $0 to self-publish an e-book, and 200 sales/year of that book (at, let’s say, $2.99 per copy, assuming Kindle’s 70% rate) can generate a little over $400/year to the writer. If the writer has ten old titles selling at least 200 copies/year at those rates, that’s $4,000 per year in extra income for the author, for old material and no new up-front expenses. Whereas, in each case, PRINT copies of those books, at that sales level, would be too unprofitable for anyone to keep it in print, due to the cost/profit ratio of physical books.
This is the real benefit that I see of self-publishing. I frankly think that aspiring writers who anticipate building an audience and having a writing career via self-publishing are being naive about being naive about how competitive the consumer book market is (as they are also typically naive about how incredibly competitive the professional publishing market is for writers). It’s really NOT a case of “if you build it they will come.” The fact that a book isn’t physical and doesn’t have physical costs doesn’t change the fact that it still has to attract an audience, and the lone unknown first-time writer is competing against the marketing machines of major corporations for that attention.
If the new author’s feeling is, “That’s fine. With 200 readers/year, I can make $4K/year as a writer, and that’s all I want,” okay. But since my goal is along the lines of 100,000 or more readers per title, I prefer to seek the benefits of a marketing machine designed to reach that many people.
Self-publishing writers often present the per-title earnings of electronic self-publishing as if it’s the winning argument. It’s not. It’s AN argument, and it’s only effective if a writer believes (as I do with my backlist titles) that the audience for a work is necessarily small, or decides that s/he will only seek a small audience. A book which, in tandem with a major publisher, sells 150,000 units, is doing to generate more income for the author at rates negotiated in a publishing contract than 2,000 sales of that title would generate if self-published. Moreover (and this is the really wining argument with ME, at any rate), the title will be read by 150,000 people rather than by 2,000.
Now, obviously, not everyone who writes for a major house ever sells or gets built to that level. (Or to the highest levels, where a title sells 1,000,000 or more units.) Most writers struggles in obscurity. That’s why there is no Right Answer. There is a set of choices and individual decisions, and a LOT of forks in the road and crossroads, and every writer has to do what’s best for himself–and best for a particular project.
I’ve got projects for which I will state with conviction from the start, I don’t for a moment believes there’s a potential 100,000 readers out there, and it’s probably best for me to self-publish electronically to make the work available to the 200 or 2,000 readers whom I think might be out there for it. OTOH, I’ve also got projects for which I want to shoot for the moon and compete to become one of the writers whose titles are reaching more than 100,000 readers, perhaps more than 250,000 readers; and that needs the marketing (and packing, and sales, and distribution) resources of an experienced major publishing company./ Even if I were willing (which I am not) to spend 90% of my time on promoting my books and only 10% of my time writing, I don’t believe it’s feasible for a fiction writer to build an audience of that size without a major house.
Well, Laura, not sure I agree on some of what you said. Some I do, some I don’t.
So let me take the thrust of what you are saying. “I don’t believe it’s feasible for a fiction writer to build an audience of that size (100,000 readers) without a major house.”
Well, quickly, with market penetration, so that you sell 100,000 copies in two months, I agree at the moment. I think that will change, but at the moment, I agree. It takes all the tools of a major house to jam that many copies into readers hands quickly, which is what they do and their business model at the moment.
But…. and here is where I am not agreeing, if the ultimate goal is to find 100,000 readers for a book and time (the book as produce part) doesn’t matter, then I think it is very easy to get those sales. And I believe a lot of writers will do just that with smaller presses or self-published.
Ahhh…my favorite…..math…..
100,000 divided by 10 years equals 10,000 books sold per year.
10,000 books divided by 12 months is about 834 books per month that need to sell.
Divide that by 10 which are the number of major electronic sites with decent sales (Kindle, Kindle UK, Sony, B&N, Diesel, Smashwords, and so on, with more coming on by the day) and you get 84 copies need to sell in a month per site.
Divide 84 by 30 days and you get between 2 and 3 copies need to sell per day per site on average over the ten years to get to that 100,000 readers number.
Okay, I know a lot of writers doing those numbers already electronically. Konrath and others are claiming sales higher than those numbers. And what is fascinating is that unlike the traditional New York thinking of books as produce, books don’t spoil and writer after writer is proving that sales electronically go up from month to month, not down.
Now the math. Again, on price. $7.99 New York paperback, 8% royalty (after escalator because you would get it at that number but not his a bestseller list unless all 100,000 sold in one week) you would get 64 cents per book and make $64,000. Nice.
Now take the same novel, selling at $2.99 per copy electronically. Same 100,000 copies sold over the ten years at 3 or so per day per site. You make about 50% across the sites, some at 70% some at 35%. So figure 50% and that brings you $1.50 per book, or $150,000 income on the same book over the ten years. More than double. Just because the book isn’t produce.
Will all self published books go to that number? Of course not. Will all books sold to New York go to that number? Oh, god no. 95% of all books published by New York stay far, far under that 100,000 sales number. And in the lower genres like Science Fiction, you are happy to hit 10,000 sales on a produce push.
So Laura, I agree, if you want to push the book hard and fast to get to those numbers, New York traditional publishing is the only way to go at the moment. But if you want readers to find your book and the book deserves to be found, and there is no hurry because of spoilage, then the same number can be reached easily.
And by the way, you are wrong on POD. It’s free these days to anyone from a number of places including CreateSpace and Lightning Source and both have decent distribution.
On a tangential subject, Dean, I’m really interested to see whether/how the veritable explosion of e-publishing and e-reading technology affects the still-onging legal debate over the Google Settlement.
For those who have no idea what I’m talking about: The Authors Guild brought a class action suit against Google (for Google’s widespread copyright violations, viz electronically scanning and publicly posting tens of thousands of copyrighted works). The two parties reached a proposed settlement, publicly announced in autumn 2008. It went before a judge in 2009. The judge didn’t approve the settlement, and the parties were sent back to the table to renegotiate the problem areas identified by the judge. The next time the AG and Google went before a federal judge for approval of the settlement, five separate parties filed lengthy briefs opposing the settlement (one of the parties was the US Dept of Justice). The federal judge ruling on the case… is reputedly being (or has been) appointed to a new post elsewhere, so apparently this case will become a different judge’s responsibility. Overall, the bottom line is that this is likely to drag on for years.
ANYHOW… one of Google’s justifications for widespread scanning and public posting of copyrighted works without permission was that SOMEONE needed to do this to preserve all these works electronically for the future of humanity and the preservation of knowledge yada yada yada.
Well, when Google started doing this, scanning books and posting the scanned pages was the height of e-book technology (and it was also how most book pirating operated). Obvously, we’ve come a LONG way in a very short time… and the notion that Google’s program is in any way special or important enough to be exempt from copyright law or from the authors’ rights to protect their own work from random willynilly electronic “publication” without their knowledge or permission…. looks ABSURD in 2010.
Yes, I thought it looked ABSURD in 2008, too. But with so MUCH of print-based culture switching over to electronic format (and whole libraries and research centers gradually digitzing their content)… Google’s argument that it had some sort of moral “right” to violate copyright for the sake of preserving text and knowledge… looks ABSURD to me.
Sure hope the new judge agrees.
Google settlement is interesting, that’s for sure. Might be just another way for writers to make more money by opting in to the settlement, but like you said, not sure how this is going to affect and what the new judge is going to say. Interesting stuff, that’s for sure.
Hear, hear!
I found out the hard way with my first book – which is still selling, thank you very much – that my Big New York Publisher (owned by a German hydra) just did not care about my book after three months. I about burned myself out with traditional self-promotion and then learned there had to be a better way. There is.
I’ve learned that all the stuff I provide on-line (blog and audio podcasts and Facebook posts) builds my audience both for my writing and for the other freelance work I do – teaching workshops both in person and now online, one on one skype sessions etc. This has been so successful, I’m planning a whole host of online activities for 2011, including e-publishing shorter works (my class materials) that never would have found a home in mainstream publishing, and videocasts. These should all continue to feed one another, widening the reach of my work.
Looking forward to brainstorming with you all during the Epublishing workshop!
See that’s what I wondered about the Thor Power Tool thing. Just another myth then. Cool.
Great to hear about the Poker boy novel and looking forward to Dead Money book and its sequels. Which reminds of a question I’ve been meaning to ask you: Have you ever read the Tony Valentine books by James Swain? I love them and wish he would write more. They’re funny and I love all the different cons they mention. The guy beating a race horse in a foot race is one of the best, in my opinion. I have a weird attraction to con games that I’m looking to use in a few thriller novels myself. Oddly enough it can be hard to find books for research. Can’t imagine why.
Steve, if you like cons, as I do, watch both Leverage and White Collar. Great shows both focusing on scams in one way or another.
I mentioned MediaBistro and their ebooknewser blog on your FB page already today (vis a vis a link to a Corey Doctorow article), but found this Pete Hamill news to be an interesting example of a major publisher (Little, Brown) choosing to send a book direct to digital because of its timeliness! They are not waiting on traditional publishing means because they want this topical book to get to press:
http://www.mediabistro.com/ebooknewser/digital_publishing/new_pete_hamill_book_will_go_straight_to_ebook_170563.asp
The times are indeed a changin’.
“I have to wonder, though, if print runs don’t contribute to this thinking? Storage costs money, and that affects the profit curve over time. POD might make that thinking obsolete.”
Print runs are typically much higher than expected sales beause the printed book itself is a very effective form of advertising. As a browser at a store, you are much more likely to buy a book you’ve never heard of that you see sitting on the shelf than if you DON’T see it shitting on the shelf.
POD makes the assumption that you already know what you want to buy, and that you never buy on impulse. In contrast to those assumptions, book sales -soared- with the advent of the desintation superstores in the 1990s (compared to the tiny mall stores in the 1980s); because the more stock you have on hand, the more books someone will buy even if they only came into the store with one particular book purchase in mind.
POD servces its function; but it’s not a viable replacement for available stock in a physical retail system.
“A natural instinct when we find an author we like is to read everything that author has written. ”
That’s my instinct, too. But your referring to it as “a” natural instinct rather than “the” natural instinct is quite accurate. Because one of the problems with building audience/readership is that (strange as this seems) MANY readers do NOT read that way.
An extraordinary number of readers who love a book… love THAT book, recommend THAT book… but don’t go any further with that. They don’t ever connect with the author’s BODY of work.
This has a LOT to do with the prevalence of -series- fiction in the market. It’s far and away the MOST reliable way to try to build audience. Because a large percentage of readers who get invested in a -protagonist- (or in a couple, or in a small group of lead/repeat characters) WILL go back and read the previous books in a -series- and WILL look for the subsequent books in the series.
But -without- the hook of investing readers in a character (or several characters) who are at the center of every book, it’s much harder to build audience. Obviously, it happens. We can all think of non-series writers with HUGE audiences. But it’s much harder. Because of the way many people choose what to read.
P.S. Oh, and my point, Orion (which I completely forgot to make!) is that this pattern is related to what will feed the need for new releases. There are a lot of readers who’ll discover Nora Roberts and only really be interested in her next book, not her previously 150 books. There are a lot of people who’ll discover THE THIRTEENTH TALE, and they won’t even be that interested in the next book by that author, they’ll be interested in the next new book of that type which everyone is talking about. Etc.
I had a movie evening at my home about 5 years ago, and of my half-dozen guests who were in their twenties, only one of them had EVER seen even ONE black-and-white film, and NONE of them had ever seen the film we watched that night–CASABLANCA. Though, obviously, that’s a film which had been readily available throughout their adult lives via many means.
People tend to function in a smilar way with books. They want what’s new.
“Konrath and others are claiming sales higher than those numbers. ”
But the factor that should always be mentioned in tandem with that is that Konrath, in addition to already having an established name when he started self-publishing electronically, also recently said on his blog that he has always spent =80%= of his professional time on self-promotion. (IIRC, he stated that he plans to start reducing that substantially. The results of his reducing time devoted to self-promotion are unknown, I imagine, since the experiment is either very new or not yet begun.)
80% of one’s time spent on self-promotion is a viable choice for a writer to make. But it’s not the right choice for me. What’s right for me is always spending at least 80% of my professional time on writing. (Partly out of temperament, but mostly because I’m not a fast writer. If I only spent 20% of my professional time on writing, I wouldn’t produce enough material to have a viable career.) And the will and capacity to devote an enormous amount of time to self-promotion strikes me as a highly relevant factor in achieving substantial sales via self-publishing.
I’m with you, Laura, I won’t spend time self-promotion past this kind of blog. I also believe in writing the next book.
Konrath has done a very clear blog on how name means very little at the moment in online publishing. He’s been fighting this fight for a time and Kris, wondering the same thing, put up a quality story, never published, under a very secret pen name with no track record and it’s doing as well as anything else we have put up. It has a good cover and a nice blurb, which helps as well. Actually, it’s selling higher than the rate I mentioned above. We shall see in a year if it keeps selling or stops.
What I am objecting to with your statements on this is the hard line. 99% of writers won’t sell 100,000 copies in traditional publishing and 99% of self-published writers won’t sell that many copies either of a book.
But the key is, to do it in New York it must happen fast. To do it electronically, it can take time and that’s fine.
I have always hated the book as produce thinking, which forced the romance writers to invent the self-promotion craze and all that crap. I have always been a believer in just writing the next book, as you have. It’s what makes us survivors in this business I have a hunch. (grin)
But on the rest of this stuff, the jury is out. And, of course, the mileage will vary from writer to writer to writer, as it should. Some writers will never think of doing anything smacking of self-publication. Others think that New York is evil.
I’m saying that the place of saneness might, in this new world, be in the middle somewhere until New York settles into a new business model that doesn’t depend on send out and then destroy quickly.
“Same 100,000 copies sold over the ten years at 3 or so per day per site. ”
As many people discovered with blogging (or podcasting), just because a blog (or podcast) exists doesn’t actually mean readers (or listeners) will flock to it. Attracting 10,000 readers/year to a title is a lot of work. I’m extremely skeptical that I could market my work effectively enough to attract that level of readership as a self-published writer without giving up a lot more of writing time than I want to give up in favor of turning that time over to self-promotion.
Why am I the first person to point out Amazon?
Books haven’t spoiled for years. While I try to get books from other sources now, if I can’t find it in my favorite stores, I buy it online.
Actually, Dean,, I think that publishers will have a horrible time, for a reason that you haven’t mentioned: scientific publishing (see the 8/2/10 entry for http://scrivenerserror.blogspot.com/. He just wrote something I figured out as a grad student).
The problem is that scientific publications are essentially vanity presses:
–someone else pays for the research and time to write the work (aka research grant from the government or other source)
–the author pays for publication and/or takes a very small advance (I’ve paid to publish my own papers, thank you for not believing this)
–the reader or a library pays a huge amount for the book or article (small print run. Old papers don’t spoil, but they are typically $20-$30 to download. Dean’s books are cheap in comparison to these 2,000 word beauties, if you can’t photocopy them in the library. )
–Publish or Perish guarantees that the system continues.
I haven’t run the numbers recently, but the last time I checked, revenues of one scientific publisher was >10 times that of Harlequin.
Science publishing will change just as fast as fiction, and it’s going to get gruesome for the publishers when scientists get truly comfortable publishing papers online with appropriate review and editing. Researchers having been doing it at low levels for years, and I suspect that the current dire funding situation for many research fields will just accelerate the trend.
Anyway, the bottom line is that technical publications appear to be the big moneymakers for their publishers, and it will be interesting to see what happens to them. If technical publications dry up for a publisher, I seriously doubt that the comparatively small amount of money coming from fiction publishing will keep that company afloat.
Heteromeles, again not a clue about that side of publishing. Textbook and that side run on a different model.
Amazon has just been another bookstore, but they have been unable even at their scale to keep books in print on their own. And of course, it’s also a used bookstore. It has functioned just like a used bookstore for a while now and has nothing to do with how New York handles their profit and loss thinking of book as produce.
And neither does any used bookstore.
Laura, I used to think as you did, the “oh, Konrath is an exception” school of thought, and then I did a little digging. He’s certainly the poster child for e-publishing, so he benefits from that exposure, but I’ve found dozens of others doing well who have zero name recognition. You just have to go exploring on Amazon a bit to find them.
Here’s what’s even more interesting: I’ve downloaded some samples, and in many cases, the writing is extremely poor.
Not absolutely horrible, mind you, there’s a reason it’s selling, but not at all up to a professional level.
I don’t say this to pick on these writers (and of course I won’t mention names), but to say it as a positive: right now at least there’s a huge opportunity for writers willing to price their books in the .99-2.99 range. Readers can’t afford to buy all their books for $10, and unlike the print world, they can’t pad their reading pile with used books. So what takes the place of used books in the electronic world? These self-published books that are priced cheap.
Imagine when more writers with *professional* level skills start putting books up in that price range.
So I really think — and even Konrath insists this is true in his case as well — that price has more of an effect than any self-promotion these writers are doing.
Scott, same conclusion I have come to, but I think the range of pricing can be wider and still have a result. Short stories have leveled it seems at 99 cents, longer stories, but not novels are ranging around $1.99 to $2.99. WMG Publishing and I decided to do five story collections at $2.99. Kris and I and WMG Publishing are thinking about doing novels ranging from $2.99 for older stuff to $5.99 for the newer stuff, a new Fey book for instance. And Kris has out five of her short novels in one package for $5.99 and they seem to be selling just fine. Of course, the five together are about 140,000 words of reading. (grin)
Also, I did the same research a bunch of times now, same as Konrath was talking about just recently. The Amazon rankings on a bunch of unknown, never traditionally published authors are amazing at times. Some are poor quality in writing, but most with high rankings seem to have the same factors that New York books need: A great cover and a good blurb.
I am sure name value will have some impact, but to get just decent sales electronically, unknown names can make some decent money. Maybe not enough to make a house payment in a year, but decent food and gas money.
Well, certainly we seem to agree on the fundamentals here, which is that the jury is out on a number of things, but the future is coming, so we’ll definitely find out (as long as we don’t go under a bus first); things will change in New York (active change in some cases; possibly bankruptcy in others); writers will (as always) need to make informed decisions on the basis of what works best for themselves and for their projects; a combination of professional publishing and independent publishing will probably be the best choice in many (but not necessarily all) cases; and there are a lot of cool new opportunities arising for writers.
But I thik it’s also worth noting, RE the business model of major publishing, that another aspect of speed is the way readers read. A key factor in creating and maintaining bestsellerdom is that reading is, in part, a social activity for a large percentage of bookbuyers. The reading experience itself is private, and word-of-mouth from a trusted source (be it Oprah Winfrey or a personal friend) is a major factor in bookbuying decisions… but another huge factor is that a large percentage of readers like to read the book that everyone is talking about, and they like to be able to talk about a book they’ve just read with other people who’ve just read it–which cycles rights back into, therefore, it needs to be a book that everyone else is reading.
Sure, there are people who are just getting around to reading THE DA VINCI CODE now. But a large percentage of the people who read that book wanted to read it when everyone else was reading it and talking about it. Reading it now holds much less attraction for many people (if they haven’t read it–unlikely, I know, but humor me) than, instead, reading whatever book everyone is reading and talking about NOW (whatever is #1 or #3 on the NYT list this week, for example).
This is why I’m always odd man out at dinners and parties. I don’t read bestsellers–for the (I admit) rather odd reason that if everyone ELSE is reading a book, I feel like I don’t need to, that book is “covered.” I know, it doesn’t make any sense. But it’s how I feel, so I almost never read bestsellers. I feel the same way about hit movies. So I’m always the person at the table talking about a book no one’s ever heard of or a movie they saw 8 years ago (but which I’ve just watched for the first time). So no one wants to talk about books and movies with me, but they REALLY enjoy talking about them with each other, because (hits being the books and movies that everyone is currently reading and watching) they can all talk with each other about the books and movies they’ve all just read and seen.
A long-winded way of saying that I believe a “speed” emphasis–the book that sells 100,000 or 1,000,000 copies THIS YEAR–will continues to have an important place in the book market, regardless of e-technology, because so many readers want that expernece: the likelihood that a wide variety of their professional and personal contacts will be reading the same book as they are at the same time, and therefore interested in talking about it at the same time. Also, the desire to read the book that everyone is talking about, because that’s a compelling word-of-mouth recommendation–and bestsellerdom is self-perpetuating in the sense that most people make most of their bookbuying decisions on the basis of “what book is everyone talking about” or “what’s on the bestseller list right now.”
Curious about this, I just went to the Amazon Kindle store for the first time ever (I don’t own and e-reader, and I DO own about 300 books I keep meaning to read, so the Kindle store is not my shopping venue), and I clicked on “Kindle bestsellers.”
49 of the top 50 Kindle bestsellers are all e-editions of bestselling print novels from major houses, with recognizable bestseller author-names/titles and professional packaging. (The 49th -may- be a bestseller in print, but I’m not sure in that instance. OTOH, I was tickled to see it, since it’s a book by a friend of mine, and it’s published by a mid-sized press run by other friends of mine. Good for all of them!)
There are many obvious benefits of the self-publishing opportunities that are available now, but based on this list, in terms of sales and reaching readers, the advantages of electronic self-publishing are trumped by the advantages of being positioned well by a major house.
Not arguing that, Laura. I agree, to a degree, but future topics will cover some of the great writer advantages to lower sales and more control, but that’s for later.
Just like in the myths, I want people to be open minded about all this new stuff. Anyone who thinks New York is evil is wrong. Anyone who thinks New York is the only way is now wrong as well.
This new series is about the new world opening up of publishing. I am not saying the old world will go away. I am saying they will have issues and I am saying that the new ways of readers reading will cause even more changes for writers.
But I am firmly planted in the middle at the moment for these posts. (grin)
Er, I mean the 50th. Not the 49th.
Dean, that’s fine, but I think it’s time (for me anyway) to go do a bit of research about which markets publishers are vulnerable in.
I recently ran into a guy who was trained as a bookbinder, and who had been laid off five separate times either because a bindery closed, or because the company was downsizing. The reason? Corporations no longer had to bind their quarterly reports, and were shipping them on CDs or over the net. With that stream of revenue gone, so was his career (and this even though books and other documents still need to be bound together).
There’s obviously nothing wrong with specializing in fiction writing or the fiction market(s), but I think it’s worth pointing out that, for some of the biggest publishers, fiction is not their most profitable product. If the tech trade disappears from print, fiction writers will get hit too. So probably it’s worth paying some attention, if only to financials.
heteromeles,
Oh, I agree that all aspects of this new technology is going to impact publishing. No issue. I just don’t know anything about the other aspects, and the way publishing works, the departments are spun off into different companies. One company, such as a textbook publisher imprint can go down and it will affect the parent, sure, but not directly into the fiction side. Those are different companies for the most part.
Not trying to disagree, just saying this is talking about fiction. How another publishing company is doing with a different business model is not something I am following. However, I do follow the top fiction publishers financial reports and read them regularly, which I am sure most writers don’t. And I appreciate you putting in your knowledge here. I just want to make it clear to everyone who doesn’t understand that the business model for textbooks and that area is run COMPLETELY different than fiction publishers. That’s all, but your knowledge here is great data points and I appreciate it.
You mean I’m not a kumquat or a pomegranate? Gee, what a relief. (sometimes I feel like a blueberry, though)
Sorry, I just had to do it.
I’m excited about the new series about the changes in the digital world. I’ve been researching this for a while too, and it’s great to see other viewpoints about it. I’m always up to learning more from other people’s experiences and research.
Congrats to Kris for getting her full series out as well as producing new books in it. I’m hoping this is going to be a new trend for a lot of writers with backlists. There are a few series out there I would love to see continued, but were given an early death thanks to how the books have been treated in the last decade or so.
I’m also looking forward to a lot more authors putting up their backlists, and hopefully at decent prices. I have a lot of books to replace with e-books, but I’m also on a strict budget. It’s a win-win for an author who does it right: I once bought the physical book, and for a good price I’m willing to give the author even more by buying it again in the new format.
As a reader, this is a great thing. And, as I said in a previous comment, as a writer its fantastic.
Well, the nice thing about price in this new way of publishing, Dean, is we can all experiment. My point is that going cheap, at least on some books, is one way to attract new readers. Most of the no-names doing well, from what I’ve seen, are pricing under 2.99. Writers with established audiences can go higher, of course, but even someone like Kris might want to price the first book in her Fey series at .99 just to attract NEW readers. It’s nice to have control of that.
And I get your point about the Kindle bestseller list, Laura, but let’s take everybody’s favorite poster child for e-publishing as an example. When I bring up all of J.A. Konrath’s e-books, I don’t find a single one in the top 300, most quite a bit lower. So if we assume, just for the sake of argument, that’s he’s being honest about the money he’s making . . .
There’s a lot of money to be made NOT in the to 50.
Agree with Scott, being in the top 50 is like hitting the Times List. Konrath was talking about being in the top 5000, and the top 500, and the numbers of sales per day and per week it took to maintain in both places. You can make a really really nice living selling a book per day on just five sites (Amazon, B&N, Smashwords, Sony, and so on) if you have a dozen books or so. That’s selling about 9,000 books a year and that’s higher sales than many genre paperbacks get these days. And that’s just in a year.
9,000 books a year times 5 years and that’s 45,000 sales, which in New York would get you a $25,000 advance. Of course, making $2.00 each on those 45,000 sales would make you $90,000 online. And thus one reason why some writers are moving over with some books.
Also, backlist. For 95% of us, New York has tossed our backlist out in the garbage like spoiled fruit. Now instead of that book sitting on a shelf, new readers can find it.
Two major arguments for going electronic. Now go read Laura’s posts about the machine help that New York can give you and the promotion push and there are at least two major arguments she gave for staying New York path.
Down the middle we go a whistling….
To heteromeles point about the future of tech books and the subsequent impact on the industry, it wasn’t all that long ago when computer programs shipped with thick, printed manuals. Then one day someone realized that they could provide that material on the application’s installation CD and save a ton in printing costs. Even more recently, I’ve been asked to prepare material that can be delivered online, so that it can be quickly updated whenever changes are made to the software, rather than having to wait for the annual release.
*All* of those changes affected the distribution side of the equation.
*None* of those changes affected me negatively as a producer of the content, although I did have to learn some new skills in order to deliver that content in new formats. In many instances, because material could be updated more easily and more frequently, it increased my business.
Other writers I know took this one step farther, and wrote books (print books) to support the applications that were no longer shipping with manuals. Again, increasing their own businesses, and adding entire technology sections to print bookstores.
From my perspective, what’s happening in the fiction world is very similar — if you work in a book-bindery or a warehouse, you might be worried about the future. But if you’re a writer, you’ve just got a bunch of new avenues opening up to you (in addition to the traditional ones) for getting your work into the hands of people who want to read it.
Part of the problem with making generalizations about “publishing is going to do X” is that there is no single publishing industry. By either revenues or number of titles, trade fiction publishing is the tail that can’t manage to wag the dog — we’re talking about a Rottweiler’s tail, not a Labrador’s tail. And historically, contracting and sales practices in trade fiction publishing tend to follow other discrete segments of the entertainment industry by from about three to about ten years.
Thus, it’s entirely possible that the commercial-fiction segment of trade fiction — which is Our Gracious Host’s bread and butter — will follow along as somebody predicts. It is highly unlikely that all of nongraphical nonperiodical publishing will. As an obvious counterexample, consider the problems with technical/scientific/professional publishing. (Aside to Heteromeles: I use my initials because the ACS stole my first name in the early 1980s; I’ve wrestled with scientific publishing from the inside, including on the Dark Side of the Editorial Desk.)
Something that I find hilarous is how the myths reform and perpetuate themselves. Case in point: I’ve been seeing on the internet (on Joe Konrath’s blog and a few other places) where they say, sure this whole ebook thing is great, BUT (wait for it)…only about three hundred writers will be able to make a living doing it. Now to be fair, on the Konrath blog the person saying this had figured the number of authors that could fit into the top 1000, and this was very speculative math. But I have seen other places on line where people say this. While I don’t think that ebooks are a magic wand, I find this statement funny because it’s like they copied and pasted the old myth and just appended ebooks to it.
I can understand if someone said they didn’t want to make their living off of fiction for whatever reason, that’s their choice and their life. Whatever works for them. But it’s almost like some people just need and excuse to fail.
Oh, well, you see this in ‘the real world’ too. So I’m over it.
I am a bit late in commenting on this particular post.
It is this “Books are produce” mentality that makes me fear dipping into the traditional routes of publication.
Honestly as I was wrapping up reading this post, I got tears in my eyes.
Thank you for this series.
**on to read more**
Dean,
“The readers won’t buy expensive electronic books, so the feedback loop in traditional publishing is that electronic books don’t sell well.“ This is the experience in Europa too: although e-book conversion into iBookstore valid fixed layout EPUBs is cheaper then ever. Example: The company I am working for charges for conversion of optimized PDFs only 490 € plus 0,50 €-Cent for the page. Means: A 400 page book conversion into Apple or Amazon valid EPUB format is only 690 €. Means: The publisher gets his book almost for nothing.
And yet they want to sell it for almost the same price then the printed books. Besides the fact that many of them hesitate to produce electronic versions at all.
Strange!
Jochen