Great post Exapno Mapcase and a excellent explanation of the issues publishers face.
I wonder how much longer there will be a mass audience for book reading. Entertainment today is so loud and visually stimulating. Watch Password or $10,000 Pyramid from the 70’s or 80’s. It’s quiet. Questions are asked and answered. The audience claps very briefly. I tried watching the new Password last year. It was a shock. The audience was loud, obnoxious, and bright flashing lights. Are you Smarter than a 5th Grader is the same way. The loud audience and exaggerated high fives and fist pumps between the kids and the contestants just ruins it for me.
That’s what entertainment is today. Loud and visually stimulating. Quietly sitting in a chair with a cup of tea and my book is a pleasure for me. I’m not sure the current generation will feel the same way.
Exapno Mapcase makes a good case about best sellers. I rarely buy any best sellers. I’ve got mystery writers I’ve followed and read for 30 years. They aren’t best sellers and I could care less.
Blockbusters are important to the video game industry, but it doesn’t revolve around them and the “midlist” that you say is disappearing in the book industry is actually growing in the games industry. Part of that is due to a recent of “Kickstarter projects” that bypassed the big publishers and went right to fans for funding.
I can see a handful of authors seriously attempt this in the next few years. Stephen King tried it a few years ago with “The Plant” if you recall. The world is more ready for it now.
Please excuse the double post. But reading is actually going up. There are actually very few studies that take into account all reading (most just focus on fiction and use that to claim reading is down), but book reading is definitely way up.
I think part of this can be traced to Amazon itself. Buying (and selling) a secondhand book through Amazon is so easy, and so much cheaper than buying new, that I believe this has had a huge effect on book reading as a hobby, while at the same time, being completely invisible to the industry at large.
The Romance Writers of America compile publicly-available industry trends and statistics; in a recent survey of ebook pricing opinions, the price Romance ebook buyers considered “fair” when a $9 paperback was also available was $5.90. Almost exactly the cost of the paperback less the cost of manufacture, storage, and shipping. the “High price but still reasonable” price point was $8.33.
Source: http://www.rwa.org/cs/readership_stats
In 2011, the Publishers Association of American called the growing popularity of ebooks “a major success story in content formats.”
Source: http://publishers.org/bookstats/formats/
People keep suggesting that if we didn’t have publishers to tell us which books were worth reading, we’d be lost in a sea of awful literature. But, aren’t those random crowds in book review threads only reviewing books that have been published by major publishers? If publishers are such a good quality filter, you should just be able to pick up a random book off the shelf. No recommendations needed. But of course you can’t.
If you read random books based only on the criteria that they were good enough for a reputable publisher to put out, you’ll probably be quite dissatisfied with them. Sure, you won’t run into any blatantly awful stuff, but there will be lots of stuff you don’t care for.
The effective way to find good books is to get recommendations from well-read people who share your taste.
Publishers mostly publish whatever is selling best. Good literature doesn’t seem to enter into it too much. I have a friend who is an editor for the NYT, and who has been writing for about 25 years. He wrote a spy novel a couple of years ago and couldn’t get an agent interested in pushing it forward: not because it was badly written, but because everyone was clamoring for vampire novels and Harry Potter-type fantasy. He ended up self-publishing, which means that he has to do a lot of self-promotion to get people to read it. If you’re interested, it’s called Spy Rules, and it’s only available in ebook format through iTunes, Amazon, etc. By self-publishing, he keeps about 70% of the sales money.
My husband is disabled and hasn’t really been able to read ‘proper’ books for many years because of difficulties holding/turning pages etc. I bought him an iPad last year for his birthday and he’s like a five year old in a lolly shop. Finally he can read books again and this sounds like one he may enjoy. I’ll send him the link.
Define “best.” What do the very small press and self publishers have going for them to get them on the best seller list other than the quality of their work. I doubt if the Amazon Top 100 list is a meritocracy, but it’s surely much closer to being one than the New York Times bestseller list, which features the work of distinguished authors such as Snooki of Jersey Shore.
I suspect that the reason some books get on the top 100 is that those readers lists and review sites are influencing which books get sold. In short, readers are finding their works. The top 20 folks you list are excellent writers in some cases, mediocre in others (as far as I’m concerned) but they DEFINITELY have some well moneyed marketing behind them, which might account for their success as well.
Who do you think the New York editors and publishers are who screen books for traditional publishers, other than a crowd of strangers? Know em all personally do ya? I’d trust a crowd of strangers MORE than them, because they’re not being PAID to profess their liking for certain books. Internet reviewers and commenters are simply people voicing their true opinions.
Trust whom you like. I think your reasoning is flawed, though.
I don’t know how Amazon defines best, but it’s a list they promote. “These are the best SF ebooks of 2011” – and none are self-published works. The thing self-published books have going for them, other than quality, is that they are most of what’s available. It’s like asking why people go to community and university theater in small towns. If you want to see plays, that’s what you get. And most of the time it’s amazingly bad, but you just put up with it. You don’t have the option of something better most of the time. Once in a while you’ll be pleasantly surprised by what you see.
But I feel like we’re getting afield here. The question of whether Publishers NEED to exist forever in the future (I think they do) is a different topic from whether Publishers NEED to price fix all ebooks at the hardcover profit level in order to survive. The answer to the latter, plainly, is no.
Charlie Stross wrote a good article on Amazon and eBooks where he argues that DRM is working strongly against the interest of the major publishers (who insist on it).
They hoped it would protect them from piracy (which it arguably doesn’t, though that argument has been had many times, so it’s best not to rehash it). But I don’t think there’s any doubt that it does provide tremendous retail lock-in. A lot of the people who like eBooks and pay for digital media bought Kindles, and now they have every incentive to keep buying books from Amazon.
Stross suggests that the publishers will wise up, ditch the DRM, and cut off Amazon’s best competitive advantage. I hope that will happen (because I hate DRM), but I find it unlikely. It would be unprecedented for a media industry to unilaterally ditch DRM.