Each workshop is 6 weeks long and is limited to twelve people. (Again, it will take you about four hours per week to do each of these.) These are the starting dates of upcoming workshops.
All have openings at the moment. For sign-up and more information about each workshop, click the Online Workshop tab at the top of the page.
Starting June
Class #17… June 3rd … Cliffhangers
Class #18… June 4th … Pitches and Blurbs
Class #19… June 5th … Genre Structure
Class #20… June 6th … Openings
Class #21… June 7th … Idea to Story
Starting July
Class #22… July 8th … World Building
Class #23… July 9th … Plot Your Novel
Class #24… July 10th … Designing Book Covers
Class #25… July 11th … Designing Book Interiors
Class #26… July 12th … Essentials
Starting August
Class #27… August 5th … Ideas to Story
Class #28… August 6th … Openings
Class #29… August 7th … Genre Structure
Class #30… August 8th … Pitches and Blurbs
Class #31… August 9th …. Cliffhangers
Starting September
Class #32… Sept 2nd … Essentials
Class #33… Sept 3rd … Plot Your Novel
Class #34… Sept 4th … World Building
Class #35… Sept 5th … Designing Book Covers
Class #36… Sept 6th … Designing Book Interiors
Sign-up and more information under Online Workshops tab at the top of the page.
Something I would like to know… how many of those iPad owners are buying their books through the Apple store vs. how many are buying them from Amazon and reading on a Kindle app?
I have a tiny sample of anecdotal evidence that it’s heavily weighted towards the reader app, but I have nothing that even approaches what I would call “data”.
The last hard data I saw on this – and it IS old – was that 75% of iOS users bought their books from Amazon instead of the iBookstore.
Kevin, the 14% data for Kindle on this chart was for tablets. Of course the iPad is ahead of any Kindle tablet.
Didn’t say anything about the 14% on this survey, Dean… What I said is, that as of the last survey data I saw, 75% of books read on iPods, iPhones, and iPads were bought on Amazon.
Curious. I had originally interpreted the large graphic labeled “Tablet brands most owned” to mean all Kindles and Nooks, as opposed to only the latest, color, “tablet” styles. If this data only represents Kindle Fires and Nook Tablets in those slices of the ebook pie, it is far less useful. Wish they would have shown that same breakdown including all devices, as limiting to tablet owners doesn’t mean all that much, and doesn’t show where the potential ebook consumption truly resides. *sigh*
Your statement that indie authors that don’t do paper are cutting out paper gives me pause. Here’s why. I decided, because my latest Derek Stillwater novel, The Sins of the Father, had a decent paper readership, I should also publish in paper. So I did. In a matter of weeks I’ve sold a couple hundred ebooks and 3, yes, 3 of them in paper. And I’m pretty sure those 3 went to my sister, my niece, and a friend of mine, none of whom use ebooks (yet). The extra investment to publish in paper, so far, has been a questionable business decision.
Mark, then don’t do paper. It is always your decision. But when looking at one data point, you might want to consider how many you might sell over the next ten years. But alas, nothing I say about long-term thinking helps here.
Trust me – some of us are listening!
Though it probably helps that I spent years working for city companies who drove me crazy by making stupid long-term decisions for the sake of short-term gain!
I’ve seen a company cost themselves hundreds of thousands of pounds in the longer-term, all for the sake of reducing their short-term spend by the low tens of thousands (because of course, their bonuses were based on short-term results…)
It’s one of the reasons I like Amazon. They think long-term. I’m not about to go exclusive with them (I’m already married) – and it doesn’t mean that I can’t see areas where they could improve – but I really respect their approach to business.
Isn’t the investment only in time? POD makes it inexpensive to do both, and while I resent spending time away from writing, I can spend the hours while I have to let ideas simmer, formatting a book. And the paper book will be there for a long, long time, just like the ebook.
Great stuff. I’d also be interested to see the infographic in Canada and other countries. Kobo is attempting to capture the international market, and they already have here in Canada. Kindle has a smaller presence here. Good to know for authors who plan to publish in more than one country.
I think right now it is important to do paper but there will come a time when paper will go away. I see it in schools right now changing over to the digital format. My daughter did most of her school stuff on the computer. I think she had one school book-math. This fall one of things added to the school list is a laptop.
The digital age is still new and evolving and fast. The next generation will not crave paper.
Vera, whatever you say.
But honestly, I sure wouldn’t bank or do a business plan on ignoring data.
Let me say this again to everyone. In the last four years, since the advent of electronic books and including the huge loss of Borders, the number of paper bookstores HAS INCREASED around the country. Oh, not counting the data in the chart as well, that has been backed up from a ton of other sources as well. I have seen exactly the same results from four different solid surveys of different aspects of the population. This chart just explained it the best is all.
If you own an e-reader or a tablet, the chances are you are reading a paper book. And chances are you will buy more books, both electronic and paper. More stores, more people reading both electronic and paper. Those are the facts. Ignore them at your will, folks.
Oh, and by the way, as I have said a thousand times, traditional publishers are not going away or failing. They are changing, slowly I will add, but they are changing. They will survive just fine.
One of the funniest quotes from Babylon 5: “Every time someone says we’re becoming a paperless society, I get ten more forms to fill out.”
Just sayin’.
I will also point out that those of us who work in offices know dozens of people who (sigh) print out their emails.
For fiction, I think e-books will become really dominant when people get comfortable using their phone as the e-reader. Just about everybody already has a perfectly capable e-reader in his or her smartphone. If you turn most modern smartphones on their side into landscape mode, the “page width” is about the same as a paperback page (though shorter in length), and most reader software like the Kindle app lets you adjust the font size to whatever is most comfortable. Kindle, Google, and others have free e-book apps.
I was never particularly interested in e-readers, but I can’t go back to paper (for fiction) after giving my phone a try. The convenience is incredible since I always have my phone in my pocket. I can pull it out and start reading anytime I have a spare couple of minutes – wife runs into the store, picking the kids up at school, eating lunch alone, etc… It also fits nicely and snugly in a slot on my treadmill so I can read while exercising.
I hear ya. Last year I read far more on my phone than anything else. This year, since getting a Kindle Touch for Christmas, I haven’t read a paper book.
I’ve tried. When Writers of the Future sent me a big pack of paperbacks of the last six or so anthologies, and I really tried to read them. I found the process of bending the cover back, squinting to read the text on the page, the smell (yuck), and just about everything else in the process of reading the printed book to be far inferior, and much more annoying, than reading an ebook.
Since then, I’ve purchased a couple print books, from authors I’ve seen at signings at my awesome local bookstore (Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego rocks, by the way). But I haven’t read them yet. Reading is just SO MUCH BETTER on my kindle, I’m not sure that I ever will, either.
I get what Dean is saying here about the plateau of ebooks, but I wonder if he isn’t disregarding demographics. We (and much of the rest of the world, West and East both) are an aging country because of the reduced birth rate in recent decades. The percentage of (no offense) old fogies who don’t want to try something new is pretty significant. I really think that people my age and younger (I’ll be 37 next month – proud Gen-X’r here), and especially the millenial generation and their offspring, will VASTLY prefer electronic to print.
It won’t happen anytime soon. Maybe not for 20-50 years. But print WILL become a niche collector’s item.
That’s not to say we should ignore print now. Certainly not. But we should also not delude ourselves about what the futures holds.
Michael, I’m not a gambler, but if I was, I would put some major money on your being wrong on that statement. (grin) But as long as that belief is like a religion, and you don’t make decisions on it, you are fine.
Hey, I’ve been wrong once before. It might happen again.
But even if I’m right, that transition won’t be for a long time yet, so it’s really a moot point.
Fun thought experiment, though.
Agree with that, Michael. (grin)
Love this info, Dean. Another of the many telling aspects of this is that Kindles, while popular, don’t even beat the “Other” category for e-reading devices, and are way behind iPads. So, beyond the shooting-in-the-foot approach of not producing paper books, how many more toes do writers shoot off by going KDP Select? By this graphic’s numbers, those writers are limiting their readership to 14% of a market that is 21% of the overall potential readers. That’s 3% of readers. If you’re not making a living at writing yet, try not limiting yourself to 3% of the overall market.
love this!! thanks for sharing.
Dean, I like the data. But assuming it is correct, I question some of the conclusions you are drawing from it.
For example, you look at the average books read per year, see higher numbers for the ereader-owners, and seem to feel that means owning an ereader encourages readers to buy more books. But the data does not support that conclusion – the data as written could just as easily indicate that the majority of intensive readers have adopted ereaders (this is, by the way, what other surveys support – that the majority of people reading 20+ books per year now own ereaders). I have seen data suggesting ereader ownership does tend to increase reading habits, however – my guess is ease of access to new books makes reading a more likely activity.
You point at the 88% of ebook readers who also read ebooks, but the data doesn’t break down the numbers. I read ebooks. I read several (3-6) ebooks a month. I also read print books. But the number of print books I read is dramatically lower, and the subject matter is dramatically different. I read college textbooks (taking some online classes) in print, and I still read much of my nonfiction books in print (although that has faded this year from 2011). I also tend to read fiction FAST, and nonfiction slowly. So I might zip my way through five fiction ebooks in the time it takes me to finish one print nonfiction book. I’m still “reading a print book” that entire time. But the rate is substantially different.
The survey also includes iPads and other tablet computers as ereaders, but a very large percentage of tablet owners don’t read books on them, or do so rarely.
Bottom line?
1) I completely support the idea of indies doing print copies. I don’t sell a ton of print copies (maybe 10% of my sales). But hey, 10% of one’s income is still 10%! Print books also give you something to hand to someone, when they ask for it. Print copies give you something to have around for book signings (yes, I know you can sign ebooks, but a lot of folks still prefer the hard version). They’re good for promotions. They’re good to show what a deal that $4.99 ebook is, compared to the $9.99 print price. They’re good for folks like my mother, who doesn’t read ebooks and would be…very upset…with me if I didn’t produce print versions of my work for her to read, too.
2) That said, print is fading. Dying out, no. Fading from prominence, yes. Number of *indie* bookstores is up, but actual available shelf space in the USA is down dramatically in the post-Borders world, and B&N is closing stores as fast as they can get out of leases, too. B&N is prepping for a world where print books are bought online almost exclusively. It’s coming fast. Schools are headed to ebook-only textbooks for K through college. South Korea will be there in a couple of years, as will some US states. Much of the rest of the US will follow within a few years after.
Yes, print sales are slipping. Yes, they will continue to slip. Yes, ebooks are supplanting print, and will continue to do so. At some point in the future, it may become less practical to bother with print. For now? It costs almost nothing to produce a print version of your book. I made back all my costs in the first week the print book was available (mostly by hand-selling them locally). Any sales you make after that are gravy. Why would you not?
Again, Kevin, as in previous discussions, we flat don’t agree.
Electronic books will be into the future a major area of publishing, and will settle at around 30-35% of books sold, just as the old mass market used to be. Mass market is taking a huge hit and will be a minor form and I can see the mass market size vanishing inside twenty years. (Mass market is the old paperback size that started in 1939 and was the highest-selling area of books at 36% of all books sold for a time.)
That’s my crystal ball. You believe that print books will fade out in importance. I do not agree. It just won’t happen anymore than the start of paperbacks killed all hardbacks. This is just another form and I know it’s the form all early adaptors like. But readers take their fiction where they find it, and many like print books. Many like ebook readers. And the majority of readers who have bought ebook readers like both. Just as we used to read some books with paper, others in hardback, and so on.
And in your calculations, where does audio fit? It’s growing almost as fast as ebooks are. Does that mean all books will be only audio in the future???
Of course not. So Kevin, we are just going to have to continue not agreeing. Which is fine by me.
Dean, the US is headed toward total (all public schools and all colleges) ebook use for textbooks. Some states plan to be there in 2-3 years. I expect most will be there in five or six, with some states lagging behind and maybe taking ten. Based on those figures alone, the publishing industry stabilizing at 30% of the publishing market being ebooks simply isn’t possible.
If you mean 30% of the fiction market (since it’s what we both know best!), well, by every indication, poll, and survey of data that is available, we’ve already passed that point. And growth is continuing.
The core difference between us here is that you see digital as just another new format, like paperbacks vs hardcovers. I see ebooks as a new paradigm, more like comparing printing-press produced books with handwritten manuscripts. There are still some people producing *beautiful* illuminated manuscripts today, but by the early 16th century it was dead as the primary format of literature.
Ebooks are a replacement technology. Like MP3s are supplanting CDs for music, ebooks will supplant print books. It will take years. There will for a long while be folks who want to order a print book (there is still a thriving LP scene today, forty years after LPs lost to cassette tapes). But like LPs were replaced with cassetttes, like cassettes went away with the CD, like CDs lost the battle for dominance vs MP3s (last year, actually), and like the illuminated manuscript stopped being the primary format when the printing press became available, print is going to continue slipping, year by year, and digital books will continue growing.
There’s my crystal ball.
That said, *right now*, I completely agree with your statements about indies and print!! =)
Kevin, let me put it this way. There are entire areas (genres, but after that last discussion, I’m afraid to use that term here) of fiction that are solidly in mass market and will not move. And never moved to either trade or hardback before the introduction of ebook distribution. And some other areas that are moving quickly to ebook. And other areas that are solidly in trade paper. And the readers of these areas keep this solid by voting with their pocketbooks.
So I am sure that text books are moving to ebooks. Let me think. Wait. Oh, yeah. Duh. Completely logical.
So I tend to use the statistics of all fiction sold (granted some text books are not that far from fiction, but that’s another topic.) But mostly I use all book statistics, which include text books. And that shows that e-books sold are 19% at the moment of all books sold. Across the board. Honestly, that is slightly higher than I thought it would be at this point. But the increase in growth is slowing dramatically. And to get to 30% is going to take some pretty staggering increases in sales in e-books and a company-killing reduction in print books at the same time. (For those of you who understand the math of statistics, you can understand the numbers needed to move from 19% to 30% of the multi-billion dollar industry.)
It’s going to take years to just get to 30%. If we ever reach that. Looking at the demographics of those who yet do not own an e-reading device of one nature or another, I can’t see that happening. The penetration of e-book devices into the population is already over 20%. When just over 45% of our country has read a book this last year. And the great statistic of 88% of all ebook readers have also read a paper book. So you take those two numbers and just look at them and tell me how we are going to even get to 30% of all books sold being ebooks? Even with all textbooks going there, and some areas of fiction. We are nearing a saturation point of e-readers into the population who read and want them. And even those who own them still read paper. As do kids.
So I know the myth is that ebooks are a replacement technology, and Kevin, you clearly believe that. But alas, it’s not working that way, anymore than audio is a replacement technology. The book industry has always had different forms of distribution. This is just another and that’s how it is acting in its growth patterns. In fact the growth patterns of e-books are mirroring the growth of the paperback from postwar into the early 1950s. Almost click for click.
This is always a fun debate, even if we both know we’re not going to convince the other.
Dean, couple things to think about.
1) That 19% is based on self reported numbers from a *very* slim percentage of publishers.
2) Those publishers now no longer have a majority of ebook sales. So the majority of ebook sales are not even included in that number.
3) Ebook sales growth has not slowed. The much touted “slowing” was that the percentage slowed. Gross sales growth accelerated from 2010 to 2011, and is accelerating in 2012 as well. Yes, it looks like a slowing when you look at the numbers as a percentage of sales, but not when you look at the actual sales numbers!
I’m afraid the music industry analogy is not a good one. For starters, I’ll just point out that cassettes did not supplant vinyl. CD’s effectively did, but cassettes (and 8-tracks) were a parallel technology. LP’s were never threatened by tapes of any kind.
Further, the analogy is flawed because it is inherent in listening to music (unless you pick up a guitar yourself) that technology is involved. If LP’s go far enough out of style, consumers will stop purchasing turntables, which in turn results in recording companies not making and distributing vinyl albums. If consumers ever stop buying CD players, then MP3′s (or something else) will have effectively won that technology battle. The same thing happened with video – Betamax vs VHS vs DVD vs Blu-ray and whatever else along that timeline. But the key is that consumers must buy the machines to play the media, and if the machines don’t sell, neither does the media.
With books, there is no technology. You don’t need a machine to read a book. You only need technology to read an ebook. So, ebooks cannot be a replacement technology because there is no technology to replace. There are no paper book reading machines for people to stop buying. Therefore, there will never be any reason for paper books to go away. And they won’t. Not until it is no longer profitable in any way for a POD house to make them available, and with that model changing the way it is, POD books will be able to remain profitable for any reasonable crystal-ball-ish time frame.
So (to now make use of the flawed music industry analogy myself) what we’re looking at is more of an LP and tape situation. Just as LP’s were never seriously threatened by tapes, paper books will not be seriously threatened by ebooks. They will exist as parallel media for a very long time.
Thank you, Joe. Very well said.
My recollections of the late 70s/early 80s are a bit different from yours, I think.
I distinctly recall a period of years where you could not find a single LP in any mass market store (specialty shops still sometimes sold them), but CDs had not yet hit the scene.
But anyway.
The printed, bound book does represent a technology. No, it’s not one form of “media reading device” replacing another form of “media reading device”. But I think it’s valid to call it a replacement technology when one form replaces the other. The printing press is, gradually, being replaced by the ebook.
It’s not happening overnight. Or even in the next few years. But consider: in twenty years or so, the first classes will graduate high school which, across the US, *never used* a paper textbook. (Some schools, even some states, will get there years earlier – but by two decades from now I think we’ll see very few schools still using print textbooks).
Long before we reach that point (how long? wish I knew!) print books will have become a minority format. Basically, they’ll continue to be read by people who could not adapt to the change, and by readers who want a “shelf space” memento of a beloved book. POD and online shopping will make it possible for people to still get their print books for a long, long, LONG time.
But they’ll have stopped being a dominant format much sooner than that.
Kevin, not happening. We are just going to disagree on this. You are making assumptions I just don’t see happening, even with the kids around me here. They use iPads in school, their phones for reading, and fight over at times paper books.
While you are making a distinction between one form and the other, the kids don’t care. Reading is reading is reading to them and that’s what I am seeing.
And trust me, the coming generations of e-readers will drop when they discover their old device that they spent a fortune on has broken and they can’t get all their books and now they have to spend even more money just to read again. I am already starting to hear that complaint as a couple friends of mine are having ebook buyer remorse wishing they had the book instead of an electronic file they can no longer access.
So Kevin, sorry. Not agreeing at all. And since this is my blog, when you come in with those pronouncements of the future, you force me to respond to make sure readers here understand that I do not follow your belief in the slightest, and didn’t follow it when Mike Stackpole, a friend of mine, was shouting it five years ago.
I shudder at the idea of all digital textbooks and am thankful I graduated college already. I do not read large blocks of informational text well on a screen and I hate going back and forth. Needless to say, I’m very glad I graduated and I hope I don’t have to spend my future children’s entire school career printing their assigned reading off a computer if their brains are wired the way mine are.
Also needless to say, the world would end before I switched to reading e-books.
I read my first “ebook” about three years ago – as a file I’d uploaded to my palm-sized PDA. I hated it. Not because the text was small or the interface was difficult to use, but because I read rather fast and grew increasingly annoyed flipping the pages every three seconds. Now I have a smartphone, but I do not read ebooks on it, even though it has the Kindle app installed. I don’t find it a pleasant reading experience.
I also have an iPad, and love it. But it’s just another delivery mechanism for stories, news, blog posts, etc.
In spite of being an avid tablet owner and a person who is very comfortable with technology, I’d have to say that over the course of the summer, I’ve purchased about an equal number of paper books (all at my local bookstore) and ebooks (through various ebook vendors), and actually read three paper books for every ebook I’ve read. For no particular reason – it’s the *stories* I’m after, not the form they’re in.
I read fast, too, and that’s one thing I like about my Nook: I can turn pages more quickly.
I also tend to have the font and margins small, to fit more words on a page.
I don’t have anything against paper books, [i]per se[/i], but I find e-books so much easier to read, I’m far more likely to read an e-book than paper book, these days.
Most of my friends, though, are still in the “I never or rarely read e-books” stage.
I published both eBook and paperback in June. While I expected my eBook to do a lot better, I’m totally surprised by the popularity of my paperback.
Aside from all the other good stuff, one big thing I took from this is the ‘all other’ ebook market. Yes, nook is small, we all knew that, but Kindle is not so dominant as some folks think it is (I am talking about people trying to sell ebooks here).
The numbers really drive home what Dean has said about Kindle exclusives etc… Now the chart is for tablets owned – not tablets book shave been read on, but look at the potential loss of readers when someone goes Kindle select or something similar. HUGE… HUGE.
the other things I noticed is that ebook users are 21% +4 vs last year. Hardly the explosive numbers narrow minded ebook fanatics swear by.
While 21% is huge considering the size of the book business, I think part of the misconceptions about dying paper and the dominance of ebooks, etc is the forum. You’re going to get a whole lot of beer drinkers if you hang out at a bar. Average grade school? Not so much.
If you hang around the Kindle forums or (and all due respect to him) Konrath’s website, of course it’s going to look like ebooks are the next zombie apocalypse…
“But the data does not support that conclusion – the data as written could just as easily indicate that the majority of intensive readers have adopted ereaders (this is, by the way, what other surveys support – that the majority of people reading 20+ books per year now own ereaders).”
I’ve made a point of asking my clients over the last few months if they have e-readers and what they think of them. Basically, everyone I’ve spoken to about having an e-reader tells me they read more books. They say “I used to read 4 books a month, now I read 6.”
The e-reader makes it easier to read while they are travelling, while they are waiting for appointments or for their kids or whatever. So they read more.
The most intensive reader I know has doubled her reading rate after getting a Kindle. And I’ll tell you why. All the things that slowed down her reading – like eyestrain, like wrist fatigue from holding the book – are solved by the e-reader.
“For fiction, I think e-books will become really dominant when people get comfortable using their phone as the e-reader.”
That would be people under 40, yes? Presbyopia and dinky cell-phone screens, even horizontal ones, do not make a good match.
I’m not surprised to see the survey says people are still reading to their kids predominantly from paper books. The kindle screen is too small for one child – much less two – to be able to see well enough to read along. The most successful independent bookstore in my city is a children’s bookstore.
“The kindle screen is too small for one child – much less two – to be able to see well enough to read along.”
But the iPad screen, for instance, is not. We have a number of interactive picture book apps on our iPad that our kids LOVE.
I think it’s important to think about how genre fiction is trending. Is it trending towards more ebook sales and fewer paperback sales? That’s my take.
Comparing print and ebook sales can be a bit misleading. Lots of non-fiction and children’s books make more sense in print. And hardback fiction sales are led by a small number of very popular authors.
Anyway, the cost to make a paper copy available through Createspace isn’t that great. I’m not sure the time and effort and cost it takes to try to get print copies into bookstores makes sense for most indie authors. WMG is an outlier with it’s hundreds of books catalog. Most indies have fewer than five books available. Wouldn’t their time be better spent writing new books instead of making the effort to get print books into bookstores?
Nothing saying indies can’t do both, Mark. It doesn’t take that long to make a print version of an already finished book. And as to getting them sold through bookstores…how long does it take to swing by the local bookstore that you’ve given a bunch of business to? Especially if you’re going there anyway? That’s on my list of things to do, now that I’ve got a nice little stable of print books to show them.
A lot of avid readers are showing the same arrogance about the e-book market that they claim the traditional market has/had about e-books.
Going only digital is a business decision that ignores a large segment of the market. Not everyone is an avid reader who just has to have an e-reader. Beyond that, some peopel just prefer the visceral feel of paper. Writers ignore it at their peril.
Exactly. Any author who publishes their book only as an e-book will not be getting my business. I love paper books and they are the only thing I am willing to spend money on. I wonder if I will get slammed for admitting this, but if there was a e-book exclusive I wanted to read that badly I would search for an illegal download before spending one cent on an e-book. The continued existence of the print format is extremely important to me and I refuse to give any money to an author or publisher who will not offer that title in print.
A tad extreme in the other direction, Rebecca. Balance is always a good option in this business, and cutting off anything is not a really good idea on either side.
Well I love print and dislike e-books so much. I feel that by paying for any e-book in that situation, I’d be financially supporting the idea that I’m ok with not having a print version (which I am not ok with, it makes me pretty mad).