I’ve welcomed a number of writers into my home in the last month, including Terry Brooks, Lev Grossman, C. S. Friedman, Scott Westerfeld, Peter Orullian, Blake Charlton and Erin Morgenstern. It’s always fun to do so because of the conversation—and as of late that conversation has been interesting.
Because one topic of discussion came up with every author who visited:
The growth of the eBook market and what it means to our future.
It is an amazing and intriguing phenomenon to observe. A few weeks ago, Publishers Weekly released the quarterly sales numbers for the industry and a glaring statistic leapt out: only eBooks grew in sales percentage. Hardcovers, trade paperbacks, and mass market paperbacks all saw declines. The eBook continues to marvel fiscally but it has led to uncertainty. We have already seen the major publishers and Amazon/Apple/B&N have discussions—sometimes tense—with one another about how best to proceed into the future with eBook pricing and rights.
Most readers don’t see what is going on behind the curtain. But some people in the industry are worried the eBook is shifting too much power in the industry toward writers/eBook distributors and away from NYC publishers, the extreme result the latter’s demise. Since a book comes together not only by the efforts of the writer but through very talented editors, copyeditors, layout artists and others, it is a legitimate quality-control concern for the future.
There are, however, some positive aspects to eBook growth that I want to showcase.
The first we’ve been talking about it for a few years. eBooks are a great vehicle for the writer who wants to self-publish. People who have been rejected by major publishers in NYC are finding they have a means to disseminate their work to the public where it can be purchased and read. This is a good thing. I’m a firm believer that a writer has a career not because of a publishing house but because of readers. After all, it takes readers to buy enough books to support the writer. Take the readers away from Terry Brooks, and he’d have to return to the practice of law to make a living. Writers who want to try self-publishing will sink or swim based on their storytelling and writing merits—the purest form of separating the talent from those who still need to work at their craft.
This is beneficial to publishers in an odd way. In the last two years, there have been several book contracts given to self-published writers based purely on their sales. Those writers are now building careers for themselves at NYC publishers.
There is a second group, however, interested in the growth of the eBook and that group might surprise you:
Established authors.
Writers who already pen for the major publishers in NYC are beginning to think outside of the box when it comes to their work and how it should be published. C.S. Friedman, for example, views growing eBook sales as another vehicle to sell novellas she otherwise would not write. For years, her fans have asked her to write sequels to her best trilogies but she has been resistant. She wants to write new stories, not return to old ones. That said, the growing eBook market and the ability to publish a short novella based on previous work—when it otherwise would have a hard time finding print in an anthology—allows her to satiate her sequel hungry fan base while still earning money for her time and effort.
There is a side effect to this, one writers and certainly NYC publishers need. When a genre author returns to a fictional world they are known for, it automatically drives sales for their previous work. For instance, when C. S. Friedman releases her novella Dominion—featuring her most popular character Gerald Tarrant—it will refresh in people’s minds the existence of her early 1990’s Coldfire trilogy. The result? Fans will go out, buy the trilogy again, and revisit a series they otherwise likely would not have.
That’s additional sales for the writer; that’s additional sales for the publisher.
And all because of an eBook novella that otherwise would not exist.
When I asked Erin Morgenstern, author of the already critically acclaimed The Night Circus, if she would revisit the black and white striped setting of her circus, she said no. She then quickly added that there were “stories to be mined” inside that tent and short stories or novellas would not be out of the question.
Again, a perfect place for eBooks.
Terry Brooks, who adamantly prefers long fiction over short stories, is even considering writing two or three novellas a year for eBook consumption, to be compiled at a later date into an anthology when there are enough of them.
These are things that would not exist without the remarkable increase in eBook sales.
Who knows what the future will hold? I certainly don’t. The good thing is, the authors I am friends with are all fairly adamant that while the publishing industry will continue to evolve, the eBook will not kill traditional publishing as we know it. Nor do they want it to. As I mentioned before, the books we read right now have been professionally edited, copyedited and proofed by the best of the best. Removing that work from a manuscript would surprise many of you.
In short, the eBook is making it an exciting time to be fans of the genre.
What do you think about all of this? Should there be concern? Is this a great time to be a writer? A reader? Do the positives outweigh the negative possibilities?
I know one thing. The eBook is not going away.
I just hope we use it wisely and to its best advantage.
I’m definitely excited about the future of ebooks. As an indie author, it’s been a godsend, allowing a level of distribution I never would have had otherwise. Most of my sales are ebooks (about 90%). Of course, I put a lot of quality development in the book production process, with professional editing, typesetting, and eye-catching covers (for my shorter ebooks called “cocktales,” I do the covers myself). All indies should take appropriate care with book production to avoid the stigma often associated with indie publishing.
>Writers who want to try self-publishing will sink or swim based on their storytelling and writing merits—the purest form of separating the talent from those who still need to work at their craft.
I’d imagine that their skills at self-promotion and social media manipulation will also be important, besides their writing. At least from what I’ve seen online.
The eBook can be useful in another way; keeping material available when demand is insufficient to warrant publishing a new printing. This has obvious benefit to authors (as it can be difficult to get readers to buy the third book in a series (or even just set in a common world/universe) if the first or second books aren’t readily available. This possibly has a drawback to authors too, of course – if an e-book being available counts as the publisher keeping the book “in print”, it might affect when the publishing rights would revert to the author (who might be able to republish a book independently, between eBooks and print-on-demand, when no publisher would be interested.
As someone who recently purchased a Kindle, I have been looking for various work by various authors; books I may already own, but that I know I will read again and again (Zelazny’s Amber, Jack Chalker’s Well World, Katherine Kurtz’s Deryni, etc. I am shocked how few of these are fully available as eBooks! I can’t find any of the Amber books, I can’t find the “Watchers at the Well” series, and only the first three Deryni books and the most recent three seem to be available (leaving 3 trilogies unavailable). Stephen Donaldson’s first and second Thomas Covenant trilogies aren’t available either. My apologies if I’m mentioning items not most recently published by Del Rey/Spectra – however, except for Zelazny’s Amber (which I’m not certain about), I believe all of these were at least *originally* published here.
Which leads me to one other thought – any book published in the past 20-30 years should (I would think) be easy to make an eBook out of, because (I assume) by the early 1990’s at the very latest, the contents of the books should be in electronic form already. While I’m not a publisher, I’ve put together enough documents of my own to know that the best way to handle the contents are to disconnect them as much as possible from the physical formatting on the page; a last minute decision to make a slight change is unlikely to cause major issues then. And, whenever a book is to be published in more than one page size, the formatting effort becomes minimal. Now, I do imagine there are exceptions; cases where standard formatting rules would make a page look odd and can really only be overcome by having a human being make some adjustments (best example would be cases where a line would fall very short of normal length, and where simply hyphenating will either not help, or will result in an even odder appearance; one might need to shrink or grow the size of a space slightly to push that line into a more normal appearance, without making other aspects of the page look even odder). I also understand the desire to minimize the cannibalizing of sales of the physical book by pricing an eBook for notably less (though, through Amazon at least, I don’t really understanding why the eBook should be priced so that it regularly costs *more* that the (usually at least 25-30% off) physical book).
However, an eBook should logically cost less than the physical book – if nothing else, the cost of shipping the eBook to stores, the cost of the actual paper/cardboard used to print the book and the actual printing cost (the process of turning paper, cardboard and ink into the book we see on a bookshelf, as distinct from the layout/design costs) – these should all go away. (And yes, economies of scale being what they are, if eBooks were seriously cutting into the sales of physical books, then the costs that are tied directly to the number of books printed would tend to increase, and it would not be entirely unreasonable for eBooks to subsidize those costs so that the prices of physical books didn’t go up dramatically.)
And, as I noted above, there should be almost no cost in keeping an eBook “in print” (i.e., available for sale) once it’s been offered. Even moving to a new file format would tend to involve a one-time cost to set up a conversion process, rather than a significant on-going cost (and there are caveats here too). There’s no major concern about shelf wear on books that don’t sell quickly; no need to clear out older, slow-selling titles to make room for the latest releases; no warehouse storage/wastage to worry about.
As many publishers have clearly noted, eBooks make for previously unheard-of marketing opportunities as well. It would be very hard to find a reasonable method to give away the first book in a series, and even a publisher’s discount would be difficult to really pass on to the consumer (Barnes & Noble won’t be buying your discounted stock if they’ve already got hundreds of copies in a warehouse, and thus won’t be offering your discount). However, dropping the price of the omnibus of the first Shannara trilogy, and giving _The_Sword_of_Shannara_ away free for the month before and after the release of _The_Measure_of_The_Magic_ is easy in the eBook world.
I think publishing houses will have to change. And we all know that change is frightening. But it does happen. the question is – can they do it well?? That is the important thing.
I don’t know what books have been published of late or by whom, all I know as a reader is that WE NEED THE WORK that the publishing houses do. Have you ever tried to read something that is badly edited? Yuck!
I must admit to being a language usage snob. I like good, well written books, novels, novella, short sories, medical reports, anything. Lots of people can tell a good story, but not a lot of people can put that down on paper or screen and make it readible. So we need the skills of the editors and other folk at the publishing houses to keep the stuff “neat” and readible.
I accidentally demonstrated the need for good editing. I meant Short Stories in the 4th & 3rd last lines.
I am a relatively recent ebook convert. While I will always love my print books, ebooks have become a good solution to my problem of “running out of shelf space.”
What I don’t like is the agency pricing system. I don’t understand why I can get retailer discounts on print books but for some publishers I am completely blocked from using the same retailer coupons on ebooks.