They’re a plot against warehouses full of remaindered books waiting to be pulped.
RealityChuck do you know anything about the business model of epublishing? Because these comments make me think you don’t. Book sales are plummeting every single quarter while epublishers are posting not just good returns, but going up by over 100%–every quarter. The panic that swept through NY in the past two years with all the layoffs and what not, not to mention the dire straits that sellers like Borders find themselves in, are not even being felt by the digital arm of the business. While midlist authors bemoan their current status and how hard it is to sell a book–after selling many books already–people who publish with digital presses are finding larger and larger audiences. Book series that have been killed for “lack of interest” are finding homes and audiences with digital presses.
Honestly, this post reflects exactly why big publishing is struggling so much with ereaders/ebooks/the digital experience. The independent publishers and digital presses you dismiss so casually are the very ones that are actually succeeding in these very trying times. Individual titles may not sell as much as it would be worthwhile to NY publishers, but ebooks are moving very, very well in general, and there are a lot of authors who are making a hell of a living off them. Instead of NY thinking “Oh, wow, perhaps we should also attempt to take advantage of this and get in on the ground floor” there’s bullshit like “Well, obviously those books are with a small publisher because they just aren’t good books and only a tiny “niche” wants to read them.”
3-5 million ereaders were activated this week. Ebook sales have outpriced print on the best seller list (according to USA Today). Your post implies that authors will suffer a devastating fate–but from where I’m sitting, the only authors who stand to lose are the ones who can’t or won’t grasp the fact that their industry is changing now and they best change with it.
This is closer to the truth than RealityChuck would have you believe. Digital publishing has literally changed everything about the romance genre–the biggest genre in the world, both in terms of books published and number sold. There isn’t another genre that can even touch romance in terms of units moved, and this is where digital publishing found its foothold and started its rise. Suddenly, it was possible to write about romances that weren’t Harlequin cookie-cutter stories, and didn’t have to be epic sagas. Suddenly, it was possible to write romances that had actual sex, rather than purple, flowery allusions. Suddenly, it was possible to write gay romance, queer romance, menages, and all sorts of situations that the conservative romance publishers would have NEVER published. In fact, they would have argued that NOBODY wanted to read those things. Now the trends in digital publishing dictate what the big editors and agents are looking for, editors from NY are taking jobs with digital publishers, and Harlequin as launched its own digital division and store.
It’s been amazing to watch the evolution on a year by year basis. In 2008, RWA and RT, two massive conferences for romance writers/readers, refused to even acknowledge that ebook authors were professional authors. This year, both conferences are going to be ALL about the ereaders, and the publishers who were shunned before will be the main event.
Where romance goes, the rest will inevitably follow. Because that’s where the money is.
No, because everything I’ve seen, especially in other industries, makes me leery of digital only: control issues, future readability issues, DRM issues, archival issues, price issues, elimination of the used market. The fact that these issues are mostly ignored seemed to be in the best interest of someone is what inspired my conspiracy theorizing in the first place.
Both Reality Chuck and Pepperlandgirl are right. What that means is that they’re talking about different specific segments of the world and applying that to the whole. So they’re both wrong, too, in certain ways.
No matter what you’ve heard or read, publishing makes most of its money off of bestsellers, just like the movie industry. A movie that grosses a billion worldwide covers an enormous numbers of errors elsewhere. Every big movie studio desperately wants one, and that skews all its actions. But there is also a huge world of independent movie makers. The Sundance festival gets around 600 applicants. Of those around 50 are accepted. Of those a half dozen are bought for more than a handful of snow. I’m going by memory, so the numbers may not be exact but they’re definitely in the ballpark.
James Patterson will publish nine books next year. A couple will be written by him; the rest will come out of his factory that uses his name but really has others do the writing. The public doesn’t seem to care. Names - branding - count for far more than quality, just as with movie franchises. Publishing has done this forever to a certain extent. If you assume that any celebrity whose name is on a book hasn’t written it you will be correct probably 95 times out of 100. This has been going on for more than a century. The science fiction genre started doing the Patterson scheme in the 1980s. It’s called sharecropping, at least by those not making money from it.
Social media will make some differences, just as it aided people like Cory Doctorow and John Scalzi. Some people with blogs will get huge sales. And some won’t. Because it turns out that the odds against marketing yourself into a brand name is approximate the same as writing a bestseller in the first place. A few golden people grab the gold ring. And then usually write a blog entry about how anybody could have done it. Maybe they could. More likely there was one open spot for somebody and you took it. There was only one Paris Hilton slot (ask Nichole Ritchie) and its now being replaced by Snookie. Who saw that coming?
Amazon makes most of its money from a few bestselling products. All companies do. It’s the old 80/20 rule of thumb. You get 80% of your business from 20% of your clients and/or 20% of your products.
What about the Long Tail? Amazon has 5,000,000 books listed. Doesn’t it make money because it can sell ten or fifty times as many books as any physical bookstore? No. Not really. The Long Tail doesn’t work, or rather it doesn’t work the way its original proponents thought it would. Yes, it’s completely true that it doesn’t take that much more in time or resources or warehouse space to list the extra few million titles. Yes, it’s a great boon to those of us who want some obscure title that we couldn’t find in twenty years of used bookstore shopping. But it’s also true that those last million titles that got listed sell as many books in a year as the slop over from a single Harry Potter title. The Long Tail turns out not to be a sales gimmick, but a marketing gimmick. It makes some people happy for not very much money, maybe even a small profit. But it really makes money by luring people to the site to buy bestsellers.
So what about the booming romance genre, which is all that Pepperlandgirl says it is and more? Yep, there are lots of smaller publishers feeding off that success. Romance titles are over 50% of all mass market paperback sales. The paranormal sector of romance - “humans with psychic abilities, witches, or ghosts. Time-travel, futuristic, and extraterrestrial” says Wiki - may be larger than books marketed as fantasy or science fiction proper. Yes, from a low start - sf buyers used to disporportionally buy ebooks - romance buyers now dominate that sector too.
But there are two things missing from her argument. First is that we are still in the transition period. In dollar figures, I doubt that ebooks are over 10% of the whole trade book market. (Trade books are books sold in bookstores. Other segments of publishing, like textbooks, are huge, and bestsellers dominate there as well.) Romance may be making inroads into the ebook market, but that means they’re competing for a percent or two of the total.
The other is that cause and effect are reversed. Romance books are the rage of the industry. Only young adult books - spurred by the few giant bestsellers everybody has heard of - come close to matching its recent success. Ebook romances are successful because romance was already successful. Romance is driving sales in all formats. If the romance bubble suddenly bursts - it happened in sf and westerns and mysteries and horror at various times - that ebook market will sink as quickly and as disproportionately as it rose. And all those small publishers will simply vanish. It’s happened to all those other genres. Some more than once.
Are we in a transition to ebooks? Magic eight-ball says yes. It will happen. Paper is expensive. The costs of transporting paper around the world is even more expensive. For economic reasons alone, e-readers will win out. But it will take a long while. Book buyers are passionate about paper. They are right that current e-readers don’t satisfactorily recreate the reading experience of a mature technology like ink on paper. In a few years that will change, but the industry has at least five more years to figure out what the heck it’s doing. (It sure doesn’t know now.) Print books will not go away in five years, though. Only two-thirds of households have flat-screen televisions even though that technology is far, far advanced over where e-readers are today. The Long Tail works better for used books than for obscure new books. As said, most new books that don’t go through a standard vetting by a professional editor simply don’t come close, on average, to the quality of those that do. But used books were professionally published. Making them easily available does have a true audience. It will be decades before they can legally be electronicized. That resource of at least a billion copies of old print books will keep paper circulating for a very long time to come. Books are about the only old commercial product that keeps its value, possibly even increases in value, even after 100 years. (Some forms of art and collectibles do, but those tend not to be purchased for the same reason as they were originally sold: books are.)
There are lots of battles to be fought. What is the appropriate price for all the varied ways that books can be delivered to audiences? Who gets what percentages of gross selling price? What happens to books whose contracts are so old that they don’t cover any of this? What kind of protection or proprietaryness will be acceptable and which will anger users? The industry will develop in marketedly different ways depending on who wins what when.
Magic eight-ball says ask again later. Sorry.
The fact that there is no used ebook market that I have seen is what turns me off of them. If you are buying a bestseller the ebook is a great value. They run for $9.99 usually on amazon while the hard cover will be $20 or more.
But most of the books I buy I find used on half or amazon for $1 or so plus $2-3 in S&H. I can’t justify spending $10 on an ebook if a used paperback version is $4.
I don’t know the legality of it, but I hope the market to buy and sell used ebooks among readers (rather than all ebooks being bought new from the publisher and the owner not being able to resell it) opens up. I buy used CDs for $0.50 or less, I’m never going to pay $15 for a digital download of a CD. Same with ebooks, if I can get a used paperback for 1/3 the price of an ebook I’ll do that instead.