Ebooks

I would like to point out one very important benefit self publishing has over trad publishing.  I have a NY pubbed friend who has had over 20 books published, but currently only a very few of them are in print.  Unless you are famous, your entire backllist doesn’t stay in print, and that is continual lost money. 

When you have 20 books under your belt, and less than 5 of them are currently earning you money, that’s not fiscally sound.  In fact, it keeps you on an endless treadmill, especially if you don’t break out of the midlist.

Whereas you might have had a repeat customer multiplied many times over . . . with trad publishing, the only option is for many of  your books to be read via used bookstore or library, where you the author, doesn’t see a penny.  So who is writing for free here?

Whlie a publishing house has the option of bringing a book back into trade paperback with print-on-demand technology, or ebook, many publishers simply can’t be arsed to do it, because they’re focused on the big dogs making them money.  If you simply insist on trad publishing, it would behoove you to get something in your contract that insists your books will remain available in print-on-demand format and ebook, and that you’ll be compensated fairly for those sales.  Otherwise your average publisher is going to sit on your rights for about seven years while you’re not making money.

By contrast, say you’re an indie author and you put out one book a year.  In ten years of hard work writing, producing, and marketing your work, you have not just a couple of books in print, but 10 books in print.  If you do it the most fiscally sound way (i.e. Lightning Source for your POD, not Lulu or Authorhouse), then you are making 4-5 times per book what you would from a trad publisher (minus expenses, which you’ll hopefully have learned to streamline in a halfway savvy way.)

What this means is…  If I had ten books out, and was selling several hundred copies a month of each of them, I would be making six figures in a year.  Now is it reasonable to expect most self published authors can do this?  No.  Many writers just are not very savvy and never will be.  But is it unreasonable to think this is possible for any self-pubbed author who is both business/marketing savvy and talented?  I don’t think it is.

Either way though, I’d rather make a bet on myself and building something that truly belongs to me, rather than make a bet on a publishing house, who could tie up my rights for a very long time, while giving me precious little for it.

When trad publishers rarely have the resources to put a lot of marketing push behind most books, I have to ask myself…in the days of social networking and the internet, is the ego-gratification of being "traditionally vetted",having  a NY editor, and a NY designer really financially worth the expense to me, of losing that much per-book revenue?

For me, the price is too high to trad publish.  Would I change my tune if a big publisher offered me a big contract?  Possibly so, but then the game would be very much changed, wouldn’t it?  Your average trad published author isn’t "getting" big contracts., nor are many of them getting big contracts over time.  There is a reason seasoned writers lament being stuck on the midlist and keep dreaming of "breaking out."  It’s not because big contracts down the road are standard procedure for most authors.

I hear all the time from trad published authors when explaining their pittance of an advance that a writer’s career is built over several books.  Yet many of these same writers turn around and attack self-publishing because of what they see as short term cost/benefits.  Why does it make sense to say a trad published author’s career is built over several books, but a self-pubbed author’s career isn’t?

Further, there is nothing in the publishing rulebook that says you can’t self-publish some books while seeking trad publication for others.  I believe trad publishing is scared on every level of us.  They’ll deny it up and down.  They’ll mock us and make jokes…   But this is the author indie movement, much like what has swept through filmmaking and music already.

Be proud of what you are and what you’re creating. You’ll learn as you go, you’ll get better as you go, and you’re building equity a trad published author can’t hope to touch unless they’re famous.

And who wants to lay odds on that one?  Talk about unrealistic expectations.

This post, by David Hewson, originally appeared on his blog on 4/18/09.

Read the rest of the post on David Hewson’s blog.

This piece, by David Nygren, originally appeared on his The Urban Elitist site on 12/08/08.

There are many people and blogs doing an obsessively thorough job thinking about and writing about the effects of e-books on publishing, so I’m not going to try to recreate their work.  But my recent posts on the Google Book Search controversy and the Amazon Kindle have gotten me thinking about what the book publishing world might look like in the not-too-distant future.  More specifically, I’ve been wondering if and how writers will get published and make money under whatever new model takes hold.

I suppose I’ll be making some predictions here, but this is more of [an] attempt to envision a viable future of book publishing that is better, although not perfect:

Print Is Dead Shrinking:  Some people think that true readers will always prefer a bound paper copy to hold, smell, fondle (the descriptive terms tend to get kind of gross).  These people are wrong.  Some others think that print books are dead, that they’re just going to go away.  These people are also wrong, I believe.

For now, for most people, print is to read, and electronic is to search and browse and discover.  But this will soon change.  E-book reader technology is at the point where it would be acceptable to most people.  All that is necessary is for the price of readers to come down (or perhaps they could be provided for free in return for an annual subscription to content) and for their use to permeate the culture (see my Amazon Kindle idea).  If the cost-savings and convenience are there, we might not have to wait for a generation or two to die off to get to this point.  It could happen nearly as quickly as digital music came to dominate, though I suspect it won’t happen quite that fast since the benefits are not as great for end users.

But print will still have its place, as it should.  Any person or organization that takes archiving seriously will see the value of print.  Yes, it can burn, drown, etc., but on acid-free paper a book’s perpetuity is almost certainly more assured than if it is simply data on server, hard drive or disc.  Apart from the conscious archivists, people may well continue to desire print copies of books that are meaningful to them.  Since no additional equipment is necessary, as with musical recordings on vinyl, and since people like to collect physical things, there will still be a market for print books.  We will have to pay more for them, however, and most books will printed on demand, so don’t expect to see stacks of every new title lying around in bookshops.

The print-on-demand copies, I’m guessing, will have kind of a generic look and feel to them, so I bet there will also be a small but significant market for beautifully printed, bound and designed books.  Again, expect to pay for it.

In summary, there will be more than one medium, but print will lose its dominance.

Mega Publishing Conglomerates Go Bye-Bye: Or at least they will look very different than they do today.  Their scale is not sustainable.  The partial implosion we saw in the publishing industry last week was just the beginning.  The profit margins that will come from publishing will not be great enough to satisfy shareholders who expect revenue growth of 7%+ annually.  No can do.

But there will still be major publishing houses that handle the superstars, the sure (as you can get) bets.  That is what they do best, after all.  But for the vast majority of readers, the big houses will not longer be the gatekeepers.  Good.

Everyone Will Be Published: Or at least anyone who wants to will easily be able to publish an e-book, just as anyone can now be published on a blog.  It will be no big deal, but also will not carry the stigma of self-publishing a print book.   Apart from writing content that people will want to read, the trick will be to get the book noticed and purchased and read.  So how might this happen?

Publishers and Authors Will Be Business Partners: It’s supposed to be that way now, but the relationship is rarely one of equals.  As Kassia Krozser wrote earlier this week at Booksquare, small independent publishers will rise from the ashes.  Each publisher will have a niche and a community of readers to whom it will know exactly how to market (yes, this is fantasy).  If they didn’t, authors would have no use for them since they will be able to publish an e-book themselves.  Tom Masters at Future Perfect Publishing has some interesting ideas about how authors and publishers might work together in this way.

Read the rest of the article on The Urban Elitist.

This is a cross-posting of an article that originally appeared on the Smashwords Blog on 4/21/09.

In my last post, I wrote an allegory on why book publishing is like venture capital. Publishers, in exchange for investing their cash, talent and connections, become part owners of the author’s book project. Authors agree to share ownership in exchange for the privilege of publication and the opportunity for commercial success.

In part two of my post, I’ll explore how the risk of publishing is now shifting to the author, with dramatic consequences for the future of publishing. Just as Silicon Valley tech startups no longer need venture capitalists to launch their companies, authors no longer need publishers to publish.

First, I’ll start by stating the obvious. Publishing is a tough business. It’s difficult to predict the fickle whims of the marketplace. You never know which book will be the next breakout hit, and which will be the next bomb.

Publishing is expensive, what with the rent on those New York skyscraper headquarters of the top publishers, and all the expensive tree killing, tree pulping and carbon-based fuel it takes to move around the glossy bits of paper. And then you’ve got the bookstores which somehow hoodwinked publishers into allowing bookselling to become a consignment business. Retailers order more books than they know they can sell, only to ship the unsold inventory back to the publisher for a full refund.

The challenges faced by publishers often obscure the contributions of many super-wonderful smart people in publishing who are truly committed to helping authors and their books succeed (more on the future for these folks later in the post).

In recent years, publishing, like all media business, has struggled to compete against an explosion of alternate (and often free) media product vying for their customer’s ever-shrinking mind share and wallet. If you examine the sales figures from the AAP (click here to view the PDF) from the last six years, book publishing has actually shrunk here in the U.S. if you adjust for inflation.

The Big Squeeze
With the tough business conditions, made worse by those freeloading big box consignment bookstores (who themselves are now getting their lunches eaten by Amazon), publishers have been forced to cut back on some investments. This means fewer signings of new and unproven authors; fewer signings of authors whose books are perceived to have limited “commercial” potential (even if the author is otherwise brilliant); and fewer post-publication promotional dollars to lavish on anyone but the most commercially promising authors.

Sure, a commercial publisher has an obligation to their shareholders, employees and customers to run their business for profitability. The flip side of this, however, is that authors can find themselves holding the short end of the stick.

Many commercially published authors must now assume personal responsibility for post-publication book promotion efforts that were once the sole domain of the publisher. There’s nothing wrong with this in principle, except that most authors are already poorly compensated to begin with.

I’ve read that most commercially published authors maintain day jobs to support their writing. If true, it would mean the bulk of book authorship is done on a volunteer basis.

While few of us authors would turn down a six figure advance for our book, author Walter Kern, profiled in this interesting New York Times Sunday Book Review feature, determined that even with a six figure advance on his book, it meant he had worked for less than minimum wage given the time it took to produce and publish his book.

The Tools of Liberation
As I alluded in my venture capital post, at one time it was virtually impossible to publish without a publisher. Today, the game has changed. New tools for publishing, marketing, distribution and selling are available to indie authors and indie publishers, and many of these tools are available at little to no cost.

With free do-it-yourself publishing tools like Smashwords for ebooks and Wordclay for print on demand books, anyone can become a published author in minutes (at Smashwords) or days (at Wordclay).

Of course, just because you’re a published author doesn’t mean you’ve written a quality book. With the decision to publish shifting to the author, it’s now the author’s responsibility to invest the money and effort necessary to produce a quality work that satisfies readers.

The Future of Publishing: Risk, Reward and Power Shift to Authors
Increasingly, authors who aspire toward commercial publication will need to prove a market exists for their product before a traditional publisher will consider them. As authors assume more of the risk of publishing, they may also reap a greater share of the rewards upon commercial success.

Some authors, by choice or necessity, will publish without the benefit of professional editing, cover design, marketing, distribution and sales support. Others will opt to invest the funds necessary to purchase these important services, often supplied by experienced professionals who previously worked for the commercial book publishers.

Self-publishing will become a vast farm league for commercial publishers. Commercial publishers, including many new indie publishers, will compete against one another to identify, recruit and publish the most promising authors. Some authors who achieve commercial success on their own may choose to remain indie.

Under this new model, the power center shifts from publisher to author, and the traditional lines between the two blur. Authors become their own publishers. Commercial publishers remain publishers, but also become service providers.

It’s only a matter of time before large media companies and book publishers start partnering more closely with the self-publishing companies, because they aggregate the farm league authors. Not only do the farm league authors provide publishers a rich pool of talent, they also provide the opportunity for publishers to supply paid services to those authors willing to invest to improve the quality of their books.

Some of the more successful self publishing services are already operating under this model. They may go on to become the next big publishers if they remain independent. Author Solutions or Lulu IPO anyone?

Mark Coker is an author, the founder of Dovetail Public Relations and the founder of Smashwords.

This piece, by C. Max Magee, originally appeared on The Millions on 4/22/09.

This week at The Millions, we’re attempting to gather some of our thoughts about the ongoing transformation of literary journalism. Today, Garth looks at the death of the newspaper book section. Tomorrow, Max considers revenue options for literary websites, including affiliation with online booksellers. And on Friday, Max will hazard some early guesses about the next possible upheaval in the economy of literary journalism: the e-book.

I.
The spring of 2007 now seems like a lifetime ago. A promising U.S. senator named Clinton was a prohibitive favorite in the Democratic presidential primaries. The Dow-Jones Industrial Average stood just over 13,000 points. And, in light of this last number, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s decision to stop publishing its weekly book review supplement seemed like some kind of weird aberration. In the best little-"d" democratic tradition, the National Book Critics Circle decided to protest the AJC’s move via a "Campaign to Save Book Reviewing." The weapons it selected for this campaign – a petition and a series of panel discussions – may have appeared quixotic, but during a weeklong symposium in the fall, its basic premises became clear:

• 1) The stand-alone newspaper book review is vital to the health of literacy, and thus democracy.
• 2) The corporate overlords of the newspaper industry undervalue all three.
• 3) Newspaper book coverage is in imminent danger.
• 4) Therefore, so are literacy and democracy.

It should be added that, by the time of the symposium, obsequies over the loss of column-inches for book coverage had shaded into alarm about proliferating book coverage on the Internet. We at The Millions, who attended several of these panels, bit our tongues. Despite our lowly station as bloggers, we looked upon the participants as colleagues. And we didn’t want to prove media pundits right by rushing to judgment; after all, our material interest in the print vs. online debate may have colored our thinking. Now, though, we can say with some confidence (and some disappointment) that, by its own lights, the "Campaign to Save Book Reviewing" was a failure.

In the last two years, stand-alone book review supplements including several of the country’s most prominent (The Washington Post Book World, The Los Angeles Times Book Review) have ceased publication. The parent newspapers insist that the lost review space has been offset by increases in coverage in other sections, but frankly, we don’t believe them. If the health of book reviewing is to be judged by what happens in the print editions of newspapers, the patient is doomed.

One need not detail at this late date the basic economic mechanisms that have led us to this pass. We may merely condense them to an easily graspable equation: growing number of books + dwindling time to read – advertising revenue + market meltdown = flawed business model. And yet, the Death of Book Reviewing narrative – a boom-era tale in which the high priests of print defend literature against both corporate bad guys and the vulgarians of the Internet – elides several contentious, and important, questions. To wit:

• How good were the newspaper book review sections, anyway?
• How inevitable was their demise?
• How did those in power respond to the digital revolution – surely the biggest upheaval in the distribution of the written word since Gutenberg?
• Does the Internet really spell doom for literary discourse?

By way of investigating these questions, we might consider the evolution – and fate – of book coverage at the nation’s most widely read print reviewing organ: The New York Times. For book reviewers, as for the larger (and equally endangered) world of newspaper journalism, the Paper of Record already serves as a sort of metonym. To paraphrase E.B. White, If The New York Times were to go, all would go. And so an analysis of the Times’ assets and liabilities, and of its response to upheavals in technology and the economy, will likely have something to tell us about the future of book coverage – and perhaps media – as a whole.

Read the rest of this article, and parts two and three, on The Millions.