Today is an exciting day people: I get to introduce my first guest blogger ever, Graham Storrs. Graham has stopped by on his International Blog Tour to talk about his new ebook, TimeSplash, and the realities of epublishing. Graham is a great guy and an excellent writer. Have a look at his blog, buy his book, ask questions in the comments section, check him out on Twitter as @Graywave. And now, without further ado, I give you Graham Storrs.
An Agent Would be Nice, Or a Therapist
It is a little more than two months since my debut novel, TimeSplash, hit the bookstores. It is a science fiction thriller, a near-future, time travel story in which two young people are tracking a dangerous killer who can jump back in time. There’s an oddball love story woven in there along with a dash of steampunk, but it is basically a straightforward action thriller. If you know sci-fi writers like Dan Simmons and Michael Crichton, you know the kind of thing.
It is a bold and unusual step, almost unheard of, for a mainstream writer – even a writer of science fiction – to publish in ebook formats only. Yet, with TimeSplash, that is exactly what I have done. In this post, I would like to share some of the thoughts I have on what I have learned and how this brave experiment is working out for me.
1. The Importance of Reviews. Probably the biggest single thing I’ve learned since becoming published is that reviews are everything. And I don’t just mean individuals writing about the book on Amazon, or some kindly reader taking a shine to your work and writing about it on their blog, I mean reviews in the major newspapers, the top genre magazines, and the top genre websites and review blogs. Unless these outlets, with their hundreds-of-thousands-sized readerships, review your work, the people who read your genre will never discover that you exist.
2. Nobody (Big) Reviews eBooks. They simply refuse to even look at them. Partly this is because the big reviewers don’t have staff with ebook readers (yet) and partly it is because they equate ‘ebook’ with ‘self-published’. The result is that, no matter how hard you try, or your publisher tries, to get a sci-fi ebook reviewed, it won’t happen. The book will remain obscure. As an ebook, sold through online bookstores, an obscure book has a low sales rank. A low sales rank means that it does not appear on the first page when a reader searches on generic terms (like “science fiction”, “thriller”, or even “time travel”). So no-one ever sees it. The obscurity is self-fulfilling.
3. Not All Channels Are Equal . If a reader buys my book direct from the publisher, I get $2.20. If they buy it from Amazon, I get about $0.61c. Amazon sales need to be four times greater than my publisher’s sales for me to make as much money. At the moment, they are less than half – partly because I have been encouraging readers to buy from the publisher rather than anywhere else. Selling books at $0.61c seems almost like a waste of time. What volume of sales would make it worth the time and effort of trying to push sales towards Amazon? A thousand per year (=$610)? Ten thousand (=$6,100)? What would it take to sell ten thousand copies of TimeSplash a year on Amazon?
4. Some Channels Are Downright Weird. Take Amazon for example. The publisher’s ‘list price’ for TimeSplash is $5.50. Amazon discounts that by 20% to sell them at $4.40 – but that is only in the USA. Outside the US (where 95% of the world lives) Amazon adds $2 to the price of every ebook it sells (even the free ones) making TimeSplash $6.40 in the Kindle Store. The end result is that, even the discounted price on Amazon is higher than the publisher’s price and, in fact, is the highest price for my book anywhere on Earth.
5. eBooks Are Extremely Price Sensitive. Figures are hard to come by, but it looks as though readers prefer ebooks to be free. If they can’t get them for free, then one or two dollars is what they’d like to pay. People will pay more, but only for big name authors and best sellers. As the price drops, downloads go up exponentially. The author Joe Konrath (my favourite writer on this subject) sells all his books at $1.99 in the Kindle Store having determined this as the optimum price point.
6. The eBook Market Is Very Small. In the commercially-published world, ebook sales may be around 3% to 5% of the print book market. It is growing fast – but growing from a very low baseline. What that means is that, just by being in the print book market, an author might expect 20 times the sales they would if they were in the ebook market. Of course, particular authors will have different outcomes in each market, and most authors are still not available electronically, this is just an average. From the trends, it looks as if the two markets may not be equal until five or ten more years have passed (with print continuing to decline and ebooks continuing to grow until print publishing is marginal.) Additionally, in Australia (where I live and where you might expect people to be interested in my book) ebook uptake is negligible. The US and Europe are at least 2 years ahead. And another trend of interest is the number of people with ebook readers, or devices, like smartphones, running ereader software.. This is hard to judge – the ereader hardware manufacturers are very cagey – but it might be something like 5 million, worldwide (almost none in Australia!) That isn’t very many as a proportion of the reading public. Given all this, it was probably a bad moment to choose to risk one’s career on an electronic-only strategy. At present, real success can only come from print publishing.
7. Marketing Is Hugely Important – And It Is Not My Thing. In the run-up to my book launch, I ramped up my blog following from about 500 unique visits per month to over 1,000. I also took my Twitter following from zero to over 900. Frankly, however, this is quite pathetic. People who are good at this stuff can rack up tens of thousands of blog and Twitter followers in a similar amount of time. If you tell 1,000 people that you’ve written a book, maybe a few percent will be interested enough to take a look at it. If you’re lucky, a few percent of those will consider buying it, and a few percent of those will have ebook readers, or won’t mind reading off the screen, so will buy it. Your thousand followers therefore leads to a handful of sales – perhaps. Yet, even with ten thousand followers, or a hundred thousand, it is hard to see where enough sales will come from. I’m not very good at marketing (if I was, I’d probably be off doing it and getting rich) but I find it hard to see how a lone marketer with no resources could make enough of an impact. Which takes us back to those reviews again.
8. Writing Is Insanely Competitive. I sort of knew this before, but I never really felt it until I had a book to sell. There are 300,000 books commercially published each year (and another 300,000 self-published. That’s a number similar to the entire contents of the Kindle Store each and every year. In the ten minutes during which you have been reading this, another six books have hit the streets. Each one of them has a publisher promoting it (more or less effectively) as well as an author. How does one book get any attention among all those hundreds of thousands? I don’t know. But I do know that, to give your book its best shot, traditional publishing, on paper, with a big-name publisher would at least not hinder you.
9. All Books Are Not Equal. eBooks are simply not eligible for the major awards. Awards are not like reviews in their marketing effectiveness, but they help. I’m not suggesting that TimeSplash would be in the running for an award – even if it were printed on paper – but it is yet another avenue of book publicity that is closed to the electronic-only author.
10. An Agent Would Be Nice. These days, I’m all caught up in the craziness of book promotion and have little head-space for anything else. But what about the film rights, translations and foreign-language sales? Should I be trying to sell print rights? Who’s taking care of that? Actually, nobody is. I wouldn’t have a clue, and my publisher is a small press which is busy publishing books, not trying to sell my rights. I knew I needed an agent, but I should have hung on and found one before I found a publisher.
****
Before I go, I’d just like to say a big thank you to Uppington for hosting this stop on my blog tour. If you haven’t been here before, I suggest you stay a while and look around. This is a lovely blog, full of funny, clever, delightful pieces you will almost certainly enjoy.
Graham Storrs is the author of TimeSplash, a fast-paced time travel thriller. This post is part of the TimeSplash blog tour running from 16th February to the 5th May. To find out more about the book, go to the TimeSplash website and check out the blog tour schedule page at “TimeSplash – The Blog Tour 2010”
43 comments
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April 19, 2010 at 10:04 am
Jess @OpenlyBalanced
This is such a helpful post! Thank you so much for undertaking this experiment and giving us an inside view into how it is going so far. It will be interesting to see how the ebook market changes as the publishers and distributors shift pricing.
Based on #5, I got the impression that authors have some control over the price of their books in the Kindle store. Is that accurate?
April 19, 2010 at 9:52 pm
Graham Storrs
Thanks Jess, happy to be the world’s canary in the ebook mineshaft 🙂
Sorry if I gave you the wrong impression re #5. I have no control at all over what the retailers are charging – or my publisher for that matter. The books by Joe Konrath I mentioned are books he is releasing himself through Amazon (without an intermediary publisher – mostly from his out-of-print backlist but also some new works). If you do that, you have complete control.
April 19, 2010 at 10:26 pm
TimeSplash – The Blog : Electronic-Only Publishing for Mainstream Writers
[…] warts-and-all exposé of electronic-only publishing is up now at Uppington’s blog All Things Good. You’ll be shocked! You’ll be astonished! You’ll run screaming for your mother! […]
April 20, 2010 at 12:29 am
Graham Clements
Found this post very interesting, especially how much money you get from each sale. I brought your ebook direct from your publisher – I reckon writers should only buy any type of book from amazon as a last resort.
I think that unless you have a major publisher you would be unlikely to get a review in The AGE, which surprises me when they review a science fiction novel.
As a wannabee author in Australia, I dread the ebook revolution and the way it will make it much harder for me to get published by a traditional publisher. To me, ebooks readers are crappy little electronic devices that add nothing to the reading experience.
I am looking for an analysis of the cost of ebook reader plus its running costs plus cost of ebook versus traditional published book.
I think any attempt at making a profit from ebook publishing will be destroyed by masses of free ebooks put online by wannabee authors; library loans of ebooks – ie you are not owning a physical item in an ebook so why own it at all; and massive illegal copying.
Good luck with your ebook Timesplash, I have read the start and it has an exciting beginning.
April 20, 2010 at 1:45 am
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This post was mentioned on Twitter by TeresaFrohock: RT @Le_Shack Would you only publish an eBook? The perils of an eBook release, by @Graywave http://bit.ly/d2XuvW #TimeSplash…
April 20, 2010 at 6:04 am
Emma Newman
Thanks for this post Graham, interesting stuff, if a little bit depressing. It just goes to show that making an e-book and thrusting it out into the world is simply not enough, not even if you have a publisher doing it for you as you did.
For what it’s worth, I think you’ve been doing a great job of promoting TimeSplash, and I understand these things take time. By getting people excited at a grassroots level as you have, word of mouth will follow, but these things always take longer than we want, don’t they?
April 20, 2010 at 3:58 pm
Graham Storrs
Hi Graham, it’s interesting that you have such a low opinion of ebook readers. What kinds have you used? I think my Kindle 2 is great. In fact, paper books irritate me now (every time I put one down and the pages flip shut, or I have to fiddle about shifting its weight, shifting my grip and trying to tease pages apart so I can do something as simple as turn the page!) Ah well, each to his own.
I find the economics of ebook readers extremely compelling. My Kindle 2 cost about $250 and the network costs are included. I reckon that (even though I typically used to buy a lot of remaindered or second-hand books) it will easily pay for itself in a year and I expect it to have a life of 2 or 3 years. I’m thinking of getting a second one so that my wife and I aren’t always competing for it! (She gets to use it a lot more than I do!)
I have to say, I don’t mind the ebook revolution at all. It will make becoming published easier for writers – mainly because the risk involved for publishers is reduced and they will therefore be able to publish more and more varied titles. I just wish it was happening quicker!
It’s true that the prices of ebooks are much lower than print books (generally) and that people giving them away has been partly to blame, (I’m not sure about pirating – my guess is that the pirate ‘market’ is quite distinct from the real one and that enlightened, low, pricing policies by publishers could marginalise it further.) However, I think one of the major effects of low prices will be to increase sales. It is commonly reported by eReader owners that they buy two pr three times more books than they used to. It is certainly true for me and my wife. We will happily take the risk of trying something new just because it costs $5 and not $25.
Your point about libraries and ownership is interesting. I have a very strong sense of ownership of the many ebooks I have bought – even the ones with DRM. I own them just as much as I own my paper books. In fact, I feel ownership of them even when I got them for free. To me, a book is a book whatever the presentation medium. It is a story, knowledge, a work of art, whatever, and I like having it in my possession, whatever the format. I still use libraries (although far, far less since I got the Kindle) and the existence of libraries of ebooks I regard in much the same way as the existence of libraries of paper books.
April 20, 2010 at 4:13 pm
Graham Storrs
Hi Emma. It is a little bit depressing – especially the reviews thing. There are many, similar institutionalised prejudices against ebooks – mostly just careless hangovers at the moment – like the membership requirements for some professional bodies – which I expect to disappear in the next few years.
What you say about giving it time is a crucial issue for me. I think my mental model of how books sell is based on bricks-and-mortar sales. There is a big launch, with publicity and reviews, the shelves are stocked and teh public is let loose on them. You have a few weeks to make your sales and you make your best sales in thos few weeks (unless something odd happens). After that, there is a steady (or abrupt!) decline, the book is removed from the shelves, and sales become a diminishing trickle.
I have heard from other ebook-only authors that it isn’t quite like that in this Brave New eWorld. The book is launched with minimal fanfare – it just starts being available in online outlets. Then its sales start to build up and, some months on, sales plateau for a while, before slowly falling off again. If this model is accurate, I won’t know for quite a while whether TimeSplash is going to do well or not.
I like the idea that people are excited at grassroots level. I see tiny people in a forest of towering stalks of grass, running about and cheering.
Maybe I need more sleep 🙂
April 20, 2010 at 11:18 pm
Graham Clements
Hi Graham,
If turning the pages easier or not having to find where you are up to when a book accidentally closes are the big advantages of an ebook reader, woopee. I know there are probably other advantages, but nothing that you can easily live without. Even with kindle for PC you have to bookmark the page you are on. Here’s another disadvantage with them, what happens when someone steals your ebook reader and takes your library with them?
I read the other day that there are about 5 million kindles in the world, with most of them in the US. As their numbers increase, along with the ipad, illegal downloads, as happened in the music industry, will rapidly increase. A couple of weeks ago I read/heard that a Stephen King novel had been uploaded for illegal downloads.
The risk is reduced, how? Publishers still have to pay for editors, marketing, promotion etc and on top of that they have to let Apple and Amazon take their cut. And be assurred, once publishers are dependent on Apple and Amazon for the majority of their ebook sales, then apple and amazon will start the squeeze.
Do you read all the ebooks you buy, or because they only cost $5 are you more likely to leave it unread, or stop reading it after the first few pages if it doesn’t grab your attention? I reckon people would be more likely to read a novel if it cost $30, as the higher price nearly compels you to read it and finish it. How does an author build up a following if many people who purchase their ebook for $5 don’t read it?
A few days ago, when I was feeling frustrated about the way writers, especailly wannabee authors, don’t see the abyss that ebooks will probably lead their future attempts at getting published into, I was about to wipe kindle off my computer and vow to never touch ebooks again, after all I only had two ebooks on it, one for free and the other cost about $6. I spend more than $6 at maccas. No way would I have considered throwing a $35 trade paperback from the same author out.
I kept kindle for pc on my computer because I am open to being convinced that ebooks are of some benefit (actually with textbooks and the ability to easily update them, they might have some benefit) to humanity and especially writers. I also wanted to finish reading the ebook I had purchased. To me we have the novelty of a questionable piece of technology and its so called benefits versus the future of the Australian publishing industry. I hope in ten years I am not telling people: I warned that this would happen.
Graham.
April 21, 2010 at 7:14 am
uppington
I’ve been watching the comments from the sidelines because I tend to be a little snarky about ebooks in general, and at the same time I totally support Graham’s courage and optimism in diving into the ebook waters.
Sad fact: Although TimeSplash totally attracted my attention, I haven’t read it yet. The reason for this is, I don’t own an ebook reader. I don’t want one. And I hate reading novels that are tied to my computer screen. I love physical books. I love to be surrounded by them. I love the way just a glance at the cover brings back to me the storyline, the emotion I had while turning the pages. I can read them in the bathtub. There is no danger of batteries running out, or electronic malfunction, or obsolescence as some newer technology emerges.
However, I doubt that ebooks are going away, and I suspect epublishing is part of my future. In the meantime, and for as long as I can, I will fill my bookshelves with books.
April 21, 2010 at 4:18 pm
Graham Storrs
Oh, I get it, Uppington! You lured me over here so that you and Graham C could get me surrounded and beat the cr@p out of me.
(Just kidding, I’m nowhere near that paranoid, really – whatever everyone is saying about me…)
On the ebook reader thing, all I can say is get one and try it. Honestly, my wife used to say all the things you say about books – she loves books, likes the smell of them, the feel of them, the convenience, the sight of them all around her, and she would never get that same pleasure from a plastic machine. Then we got a Kindle and she changed her mind completely. A 180 degree reversal. She now refuses to buy paper books. When I tell her about a book she wants to know when it’s available as an ebook.
Devices like the Kindle were designed for reading (unlike iPhones and iPads, etc.) and the experience is not just good, in my view it is better than a paper book. I know it probably sounds incredible, but that is what I’ve found. I’m someone who has a houseful of paper books and probably always will (and I hate reading anything longer than a short story on a computer screen) but ebook readers are actually very good – and they will only get better.
Oddly, I decided to publish ebook-only before I’d even seen an ebook reader – based solely on the trends and the conviction that this is the way publishing must go. My only issue with my decision is that I seem to have jumped in a couple of years too early.
Graham C, I can’t understand your conviction that the rise of electronic publishing will make it harder for new writers to be published. I can see that, eventually, publication *on paper* will become increasingly rare and, in the end, reserved for luxury (very expensive) special editions for fans of big name, bestselling authors – and collectors. But by then, electronic-only or electronic-first publication will be the norm and, as I say, the reduced costs will make publishers likely to publish more and experiment more (in your reply above, you missed the huge costs of printing and distribution and managing returns). I can only see it as a good thing for authors.
I have to say that I don’t get your argument about price vs the likelihood of reading either. If I have $35 to spend and I buy one trade paperback or *seven* $5 ebooks, and the trade paperback is rubbish (I never finish a book I don’t like, no matter what it cost me – my time is more valuable than that!), but only 4 out of the 7 ebooks are rubbish – or even 6 out of the 7 – aren’t I much better off with the ebooks? The quality of a book doesn’t depend on its price. If I can buy seven times as many books for the same money, don’t I optimise my chance of finding something worth reading?
April 22, 2010 at 11:06 pm
gypsyscarlett
I have to echo Uppington here: “I don’t want one. And I hate reading novels that are tied to my computer screen. I love physical books. I love to be surrounded by them. I love the way just a glance at the cover brings back to me the storyline, the emotion I had while turning the pages. I can read them in the bathtub. There is no danger of batteries running out, or electronic malfunction, or obsolescence as some newer technology emerges.”
Also, I love browsing through bookstores and fleamarkets. I love the warmth, the cozy feeling that large bookcases give to rooms in houses. I love receiving books as gifts with inscriptions written on the inside cover to me. And to give such gifts in return.
If others like e-books- fine. We all have different tastes.
April 22, 2010 at 11:38 pm
Graham Storrs
Thanks for the echo, gypsyscarlett. You’re right, of course, that certain social and symbolic processes have developed around books – just as they do around all the artifacts of our lives. I think it is good to acknowledge this and to accept that, as the technical milieu shifts and changes, so too will our enjoyments change, and sources of pleasure undiscovered yet will present themselves.
A fondness for the pleasures of our childhood should not stop us finding pleasure in our adult state. The pleasures of today sould likewise not leave us so regretful at their passing that we are unable to take delight in pleasures yet to come.
On a less abstract note, no-one who is an adult today need fear ever living in a world without paper books, but people who read only from paper will find themselves increasingly denied access to new works and new voices.
April 22, 2010 at 11:53 pm
Graham Clements
Hi Graham,
I also admire Graham Storrs for taking a chance on ebooks and I hope he succeeds. His release of an ebook had me finally putting Kindle on my PC so I could read it. I hope other first time authors succeed too with their ebooks, well maybe not Sarah Palin or Tony Abbott.
With ebooks I envisage a future where Amazon dominates. All ebooks are listed on Amazon in the US. There is no Amazon Australia promoting Australian authored ebooks. So how does the Australian publisher and author survive among the massive number of ebooks? A reader could search for Aussie authors, but a speculative fiction reader is much more likely to search for science fiction or fantasy or horror, in which case they will get a display of the bestselling authors of that genre, a display they will probably have to search a long way through until they get to an Aussie.
So how the hell do Australian publishers make any money? They try to promote themselves and their authors. Promotion costs will skyrocket and this will need to come out of what I consider ridiculously cheap prices for ebooks. Publishers will want to create brand names out of proven authors like Sean Williams. They won’t want to spend a lot of money on an unproven (non celebrity) new author, if they even bother signing them, so we all better become celebrities before we submit our manuscripts to publishers.
How do Aussie authors compete when they are just another ebook listed on Amazon? Will readers go to publisher and author sites? (I think Apple’s ipad has a major problem with users having to sign up to a telco type plan to use them, so Apple might already be dead as a competitor to Amazon.) Readers probably won’t go to publisher sites, why bother when all the books are on Amazon. Some readers might visit the sites of well established authors and buy the book off the site, but the only person likely to visit and buy from a new (non-celebrity) author’s site is their mum.
At the moment, Aussie publishers send salesmen around to bookstores to plug Aussie books. With ebooks taking at least half the market in the next decade, there will not be many bookstores left. Barnes and Noble and Borders will have a go at competing online against Amazon, but in the end they will probably fail against the might of Amazon. Kmart and Big W will probably stop selling their loss leading books as the people who buy them turn to the even cheaper ebook.
This is why I am not looking forward to the ebook revolution.
In regard to spending $35 on a trade paperback. I read book reviews and follow authors to try an ensure that I will enjoy a book. This doesn’t of course always work. I do take chances on new authors, but not until I have done a bit of research on them and what their book might be like.
I don’t think I would I buy more books if I had an ebook reader as I still only have the same limited book reading time and I’ve got bookshelves full of unread novels from garage sales (which is what I think someone who gets an ebook reader will intially do, fill it with cheap or free ebooks, whether they will ever read any of them, who knows).
I would be more likely to take a chance on a new author if their book was a cheap ebook, but I would have to hear about them first. As a writer I network with other writers and hear about their new books, but most other readers don’t. Where are they going to hear about the new Aussie authors if there are no Aussie publishers left or with any money to promote them?
One advantage I see with ebooks is with the downloading of anthologies, speculative fiction magazines and individual short stories. Instead of having to find a magazine in some obscure store or subscribing and waiting for a spec fiction mag to be mailed out sometime in the distant future, a reader will be able to download it instantly. Maybe readers will be able to download individual stories from a magazine or collection, like singles from a CD, and I would be able to download all the science fiction and only some of the non-magic/sword and sorcery fantasy stories from a magazine. Of course, they might just download the known authors and none of the unknown new author’s stories.
April 23, 2010 at 3:37 am
Graham Storrs
Graham C., I see now where you’re coming from. I agree that ebooks are likely to kill small. regional publishers – like the ones in Australia. I’ve been arguing for a long time that Australian publishers and booksellers should get their arses in gear and embrace electronic publishing ahead of all the rest as the only strategy for survival. There is no reason why all Amazon’s competitors should be American. Australia has shown before that it can build globally-competitive media companies. It needs to act right now (or maybe last year) to stand any chance though.
Yes, without indigenous publishers, Australian authors will have a harder time of it. Worse still, Australian culture will become even more ‘Americanized’ than it already is. It’s a tragedy, but it looks like the boat has sailed on this one and we’ll just have to lump it (even if we don’t like it.)
Frankly, I feel quite bitter about Australian publishing anyway. For years I was turning out sci-fi books set in Australia, with Australian characters and language. No Australian agent showed any interest. The one Australian publisher who bothered to take a look at one of my novels suggested I set the book in the USA instead. Then I wrote TimeSplash – which is set overseas – and, while the handful of Aussie agents that handle sci-fi were busy rejecting it, a New York publisher accepted it. Since then, I have had no reviews – not one – from any Australian magazines and most Australian sci-fi sites (and writers!) have ignored TimeSplash completely. Apart from that cultural issue, I’m not feeling too inclined right now to mourn the coming demise of Australian publishing.
If I was writing bush poetry, or deep literature about the plight of the Aborigines, I’d be sick as a parrot. Fortunately, sci-fi has a global audience and I’m happy to compete in the US or UK for book deals. And if Australian publishing can’t get off its backside to save Aussie literature, then that’s a debate that should be happening in Parliament, not here. (Besides, apart from small presses, Aussie publishers are all owned by overseas companies – so it’s not surprising they’re doing nothing.)
April 23, 2010 at 6:45 am
Jim Hutchins
I’m not normally a first adopter, but I bought an iPad on the day it was released.
It’s my first eBook reader (and it does plenty of other things). Contrary to what Graham Clements has posted above, it works just fine on extant wireless networks but those may be more pervasive here in the US than elsewhere.
I love the feeling of reading a book on my iPad. I like being able to cart around a fairly large library in my little device (or at least, it’s littler than carting around the physical books).
Like Graham Storrs, I am hung up on the marketing piece. I am perhaps lucky in that I’m not (much) interested in making money, as I have a day job, and I have a nonfiction book in a teeny specialty market that sells about $3K a year and I’m happy with that. What I crave is exposure, the chance to reach a larger number of people.
I would like to sell at the $0.99-$1.99 price point, but before that I need two things:
1) a really, really good book editor who will read it front to back (even “cover” to “cover”) and really beat on it, so that I am putting out the best possible product;
2) help with marketing so that at least people will be curious enough to read a few sample pages and decide whether they want the whole book or not.
I’m not hopeful that any agent who wants to make a living will be interested in someone like me who is focused on the craft of writing for the e-market. If I had to pay the rent, I would rather take a chance on someone becoming the next Stephanie Meyers than work with a wahoo like Jim Hutchins. Do the math: calculate the marginal value of a 1/1000 shot at a $5M score vs a 1/1 shot at a $300 score. It would be a lot of work for someone to make a very small amount of money marketing my book.
April 23, 2010 at 7:02 am
gypsyscarlett
“The one Australian publisher who bothered to take a look at one of my novels suggested I set the book in the USA instead.”
I love to read novels that take me away to places I’ve never been. I’d be more than happy to read a good novel set in Australia, or anywhere else.
April 23, 2010 at 4:25 pm
Graham Storrs
GypsyScarlett, so do I. Sadly, the view of publishers is that most Americans disagree with us. They say Americans like only what they know. This is taken to such an extreme that books have to be ‘translated’ from UK or Australian dialects of English to an ‘Americanized’ dialect (it’s not just the spelling, it’s also changing words like ‘mum’ into ‘mom’!)
April 23, 2010 at 5:00 pm
Graham Storrs
Jim, nice to hear a pro-ebook opinion! I was beginning to wonder if I’d stumbled into an 18th Century salon, with my flies undone and the literati of the day looking disdainfully at me through their lorgnettes. I would not have been surprised if Dr. Johnson had appeared, whacked me across the head with Pope’s translation of Homer, and cried, “Electrons, sirrah? Try doing that with electrons!”
But seriously though, Jim, your point about writing for exposure rather than money is one that fascinates me. Given that there are more than twice as many self-published books appearing each year at the moment as there are commercially published ones, (over 700,000 self-published books last year vs under 300,000 commercially published,) it must be a sentiment shared by vast numbers of people. Electronic self-publishing (being so much easier and cheaper than self-publishing to paper) can only exascerbate this trend.
My own feeling is that publication and marketing are so onerous, so draining, so time-consuming, that the main reason for doing it has to be financial reward. I could put my novels on my website (or Smashwords) as free downloads and have them seen by just as many people as I can by having them commercially published (probably a lot more) so I am clearly not doing this for the exposure alone. Yet the chances of financial gain are vanishingly small (especially, as it turns out, for electronic-only publishing!)
In fact, given how easy and cheap it is to self-publish these days, you wonder why anybody bothers with commercial publishing at all. I think the answer has to be that there is a degree of validation, or legitimisation, attached to commercial publishing that writers crave. Our fragile but massive egos (like man-sized soap bubbles) require us to seek confirmation by authority-figures that our work really is good. The fact that somebody else publishes our work, not ourselves, is tantamount to them recommending it to the world. It’s a wonderful feeling. Childish, of course, but there it is.
April 24, 2010 at 2:32 am
gypsyscarlett
“GypsyScarlett, so do I. Sadly, the view of publishers is that most Americans disagree with us. They say Americans like only what they know. This is taken to such an extreme that books have to be ‘translated’ from UK or Australian dialects of English to an ‘Americanized’ dialect (it’s not just the spelling, it’s also changing words like ‘mum’ into ‘mom’!)”
As an American (albeit one living in Europe), it has always annoyed me that certain people (like the publishers you mentioned) assume such things about Americans.
And as for changing dialects into American- I find that extremely silly and counterproductive. When I read a novel that takes place in England- I prefer to see words like, “lift” instead of “elevator”. “Flat” instead of “apartment”. “Mum” instead of “mom”. Even little details like that remind a reader that they are in a different place. It adds a special ambience.
April 24, 2010 at 3:01 am
Graham Storrs
🙂 gypsyscarlett, next time I am in an argument on this subject with an editor, I will tell them to call you!
April 24, 2010 at 11:46 pm
Graham Clements
Hi Jim,
In Australia, from what I’ve been told, users of the ipad will have to pay for a wireless broadband connection to use it. Not sure how much that will cost. Unlike the Kindle where there are no additional connection costs, so I’ve been told. If this is true, and the telcos charge as much as they do for say mobile phone connections, for Australians who predominately want an ebook reader ipad is going to find it very hard to compete with the already half the price Kindle.
It appears, by charging less then $2 for your ebook – which ten of thousands are already priced at, that you want to compete on price, not content. When there are thousands like you, the price of ebooks will quickly reduce to virtually nothing. I suggest you resist the urge and charge a price that represents some of the work you have put into writing it.
How will you cover the cost of an editor and marketing selling at just 99c? Personally, I would be less likely to download a $2 ebook than a $10 ebook because I would be asking the question, could the writer have afforded to have it edited?
Even thought you say the potential market for your book is very small, your comments back up what I have said in previous posts, that the ebook revolution will destroy not only the Australian publishing industry, but probably the US publishing industry as well. Writers will be reduced to free content providers for Amazon.
April 24, 2010 at 11:50 pm
Graham Clements
Hi Graham,
Adrian Beford’s Time Machines Repaired While U Wait is set in Australia and full of Aussie slang. He couldn’t get it published in Australia, but managed to get it published in Canada. After it won the Aurealis for best Aussie Speculative Fiction novel, it is now being published in Australia.
April 25, 2010 at 12:24 am
Graham Storrs
Adrian Bedford’s Time Machines Repaired While U Wait – Yes, this one’s on my radar. I hadn’t realised it had been published in Canada first – but then I don’t pay much attention to awards and winning one generally puts me off a book (just perversity, I suppose, but, on the other hand, I’ve rarely read an award winner that I’ve liked – not for decades anyway.)
I’m waiting for this one to come out as an ebook.
April 25, 2010 at 4:49 am
Emma Newman
@gypsyscarlett and Graham S – there is hope. The American indy press that is publishing my debut novel (I am a Brit btw and the novel is set in London) was wonderful on the american English thing – he has kept all English spelling, phrasing and colloquialisms because he felt the same – that it all added to the atmosphere of post-apocalyptic London. And he didn’t complain when I rejected an edit because it made a bit of dialogue sound American.
And funnily enough, I have a lot of American readers of my Friday flash stories which are even more British in their feel (and deliberately so) who have said that they love the British-ness (if there is such a word?) of the phrasing. Maybe US publishers (and australian ones by the same token) are missing a trick and not having enough faith in the readers to adapt and drink in the ‘local colour’ as one would when travelling.
April 25, 2010 at 5:29 am
Jen Brubacher
It’s so depressing to see people hating on ebooks when they admit they haven’t really tried them. I was surprised by my own reaction. I had no idea my ereader (given to me as a gift– probably wouldn’t have bought one myself) would make me read more, more often, and more varied. I love getting samples from Smashwords and often purchase the full books later on. WH Smith has a great ebook site and Waterstones is working on it. I’m happy to pay 5 or 10 pounds for a book I know little about, and more if I’m excited about the title. And I still like getting a hardback book here and there to be signed, or keep on display.
It just doesn’t all seem as dire to me as some people would like to make out.
April 25, 2010 at 10:56 am
gypsyscarlett
Emma,
Much congratulations on your novel debut. And yes, publishers do need to have more faith in their readers.
Jen,
I don’t hate e-books. I simply have no desire for an e-reader. I don’t just love the reading experience, I love *books* themselves. On a similar note, I have a friend who collects records. Sure he can listen to the same music on cd, but there is something about records that he just loves.
I agree with you that the book situation doesn’t have to be dire. I certainly believe there is room for both paper and electronical formats. People will always have different needs, tastes, and preferences.
April 25, 2010 at 3:01 pm
Graham Storrs
Hi Emma. I had a similar – but not quite so happy – experience with my own publisher. They agreed that they would not ‘Americanize’ the book and for the first couple of rounds of editing, all was fine. Where my editor told me American readers simply would not have a clue what I was talking about (e.g. the word ‘lay-by’ in relation to roads, apparently means nothing across the pond) I was happy to rewrite to avoid using the word. We used the Chicago Manual of Style to settle disputes, which, in most cases, is close enough to English grammar and usage as not to matter. However, as well as CMoS, the publisher had their own style manual or ‘house style’. This is actually mandated in the contract and was rigidly adhered to by the editorial team. It has some very odd rules and it also specifies the spellings of certain words – American spellings, of course. It was impossible to write around everything – although I had a good try – and the result is a strange, hybrid spelling system throughout the book. Annoyingly, since publication, people have written to point out ‘typos’, American spellings introduced by this process!
April 25, 2010 at 3:10 pm
Graham Storrs
Jen, I have heard the same thing from lots of people; they didn’t want an ebook reader, but once they started using one, they found they really liked it. I suppose that, having read paper books since we were kiddies, it just seems incredibly unlikely that any other reading technology will work as well. And, of course, we have all had the very unsatisfactory experience of reading from computer screens, which is bound to bias us against other screen-based technologies.
April 25, 2010 at 3:39 pm
Graham Storrs
gypsyscarlett, I wonder what your position is on digital photography. Several older technologies have been ‘digitalised’ lately. You mention a friend who still likes vinyl records. There are still people who won’t use digital stills cameras. I find that all the people I know who won’t change over – despite the manifest improvements in cost and convenience the digital version brings – insist that there are just-discernible quality differences between the older, analogue technologies and the new digital ones. It may actually be true for digital recordings vs analogue ones (at the very top end of the analogue market, and for people whose ear is good enough to detect the difference). It certainly has been true for digital photography (at the professional end of the market) until very recently but most professional photographers have now ‘gone digital’.
I haven’t heard anyone say (until your report) that there is ‘something about records’ as objects that makes them preferable to MP3s (or some other digital technology) but I’m happy to believe there are people who feel this. I hear people say all the time that they like books as objects (the heft, the smell, the riffle of the pages, etc..)
There are not enough record-as-object lovers (or even analogue-as-superior-technology buffs) to keep the vinyl record industry going (except as a tiny, specialist market.) There are not enough chemical photography enthusiasts to keep the film-developing-printing market going (except, again, as a small, niche market.) I wonder if there will be enough book-as-object lovers to keep print books going except on a very small scale. Without doubt, the book is a cultural icon in the way that records and photographs are not. Possibly it is because of their much longer history as mass-market repositories of text. Perhaps also because of the long period during which they were scarce, expensive, and symbols of wealth and scholarship. The vinyl record and the chemical photograph were virtually expunged from society within a decade of a digital equivalent appearing. I suspect books will survive a bit longer.
April 25, 2010 at 3:49 pm
uppington
Interesting. My teenage son and his friends also collect vinyl albums, and play them from time to time. I love the kids for this, btw. I think there is perhaps a flaw in the analogy you are making between DVDs/MP3s and digital books vs. paper books. I don’t know about everybody, but my kids still buy the CDs, and download the music. For several reasons – one being that if the computer crashes, if the MP3 breaks or gets lost, you still have your music. I don’t know how often I’ve seen panic messages on Twitter – help, my reader isn’t working, it won’t turn on, the screen is stuck, I’m out of battery. Not to mention the Oh My God Amazon has wiped a book off of my Kindle. If my only copy of a book is on an electronic reader I am at the mercy of batteries, technology, and potentially a corporation. Not to mention that, as I understand it, if I own a book on a Kindle and then decide I’d rather have an iPad, I’m going to lose my library.
I have antique books in my house – copies extant from the 1800s. I very much doubt any book I buy on an ereader today will still be readable by my grandchildren. This disturbs me.
April 25, 2010 at 6:28 pm
Graham Storrs
Uppington, I think you’re right. Digital media are far more ephemeral than paper. Even if you back up all your digital media onto gold-plated CDs (which you can, it’s not expensive) their storage life is still only 100 years – by which time, of course, there wont be any devices around that can read them. Keeping your digital collections fresh mean migrating them to new formats and new technologies every decade or so! I still have Microsoft Word documents from the early 1990s, and some of those were updated from earlier formats, but I have to remember to keep such things current.
But maybe that is a reflection on how our productions are actually valued by us? I have some vinyl ‘singles’ – pop music from the late 1950s – and I imagine that, just 50 years on from when they were popular, these records are now becoming rare. In another fifty years, they will be rarer still, beyond that, they will only exist as curios in museums. And that’s not a bad life for something as trivial as a pop song.
And I’m fairly confident that anything of any intrinsic quality (like Shakespeare, or Mozart) will continue to be protected and updated. We don’t read Shakespeare in the folio editions – they are extremely rare and precious – we read modern reprints, mostly just a few years old. I’m sure the same will happen for digital content (except it will be easier to preserve and reproduce.)
I just want to say that I didn’t make an analogy between “DVDs/MP3s and digital books vs. paper books” it was between analogue vs digital in each case – so, vinyl records vs MP3s. I also buy CDs and rip them so that I can listen to the music as MP3s. It just happens that broadband prices and speeds in rural Australia mean it is still more convenient and not much more expensive to buy CDs. If I had decent broadband, I would only ever download music.
You certainly do need to be aware of Digital Rights Management on digital content that you buy (DRM being the reason you can’t read a Kindle book on some other devices – although most computers, including the iPad, will run the Kindle reader so you would be absolutely OK there.) You need to distinguish between the device, the software it runs, the format of the files you buy, and the DRM, if any, the publisher puts on them. MOst general-purpose computers (like your notebook, your desktop, your iPad, and your smartphone) will run a wide range of e-reader software, including Kindle. Special-purpose e-reader devices (like the Kindle, Nook, Sony, iRex, etc., etc.) tend to run only a few file formats each, although the trend is to running more and more per device. The Kindle runs .prc, .mobi and .pdf files. If you buy from the Kindle Store, you get them with DRM which restricts their use elsewhere (and gives Amazon the right to remove them!) So I tend to get my ebooks from suppliers who sell these formats without DRM, meaning they’re portable, easy to save safely when I do my normal backups, and Amazon can’t touch them. My own novel is avalable directly from the publisher in seven different,
April 25, 2010 at 6:29 pm
Graham Storrs
DRM-free formats (oops, hit Return by accident). Which is one reason I recommend buyers to get it there, rather than from Amazon.
April 25, 2010 at 6:42 pm
uppington
You’re right about the CD/MP3 analogy – sorry about that. I think I knew better and wrote my comment in a hurry. I think you are probably entirely right about epub being the way of the future. I will have to get on board with that. But I don’t want to. I want my reading experience to be simple. I don’t want to worry about batteries and formats and downloads. Certainly not about updating my library every few years. Pick up the book, open to the page I left off, and read. Read in the bathtub. Spill coffee on it by mistake. It will survive. Take it camping or backpacking – no fear it will run out of batteries. Much will be lost. And if there were to be some huge technological disaster, potentially everything to be lost.
April 25, 2010 at 7:03 pm
Graham Storrs
I absolutely agree. It has to get a LOT simpler than it is now. And I expect it will. De facto standards will emerge for portability. This is the very beginning of this technology. At the moment, it’s like buying a computer in the late 1970s – every manufacturer does something different and there is no compatibility anywhere. Then Microsoft and IBM came along… Computing still hasn’t settled down (we still have Microsoft vs Apple vs all the many Unixes and Linuxes) but personal computing is still just 35 years old!
The amazing thing is that ebooks are so popular despite this!
(PS This battery thing… I’d have no concern about taking my Kindle camping. A fully charged battery lasts for ages – I’d be amazed if I didn’t get a week out of it – and that’s more than the amount of camping I can stand in one go. And if someone walked in right now and smashed my kindle to pieces with a hammer I would still have all my books. They are all safely backed up on my desktop computer and on an external hard-disk drive. And, to be safe from house fires, I could back them all up onto DVDs and store them in the shed, if I was really worried. Something I can’t do with my books!)
April 25, 2010 at 10:36 pm
Graham Clements
Graham,
Can a Kindle ebook purchased from amazon be transferred to some other device for safekeeping in case of fire, theft or some other problem? How transferrable are the non DRM ebooks. Can you make mutliple copies and send them to your friends?
April 25, 2010 at 10:46 pm
Graham Clements
Jen,
I don’t hate ebooks, I just say they seem like they are going to destroy the publishing industry.
Sending of samples to kindles sounds like a good marketing tool, but who decides what samples you are sent? Will a kindle be so overloaded with free samples that a reader eventually just automatically deletes them like many people now do with their email? Will the receipt of these samples, reading of them, and purchasing of the ebook limit the reading range of a reader to a particular genre or sub-genre such as steampunk written by established British authors?
At least when I read the book pages of the Age I can browse the titles of a variety of books and decide whether I am interested in reading their reviews. When I go into a bookshop, there’s a chance that other titles among the new releases might catch my attention and I widen my range.
April 25, 2010 at 10:48 pm
Graham Clements
Graham,
I can’t believe you have not liked an award winning book. I suspect you have.
April 26, 2010 at 12:23 am
Graham Storrs
“I can’t believe you have not liked an award winning book. I suspect you have.”
LoL. If I have, it was an accident! The last thing I know I liked that also won an award (or was it just nominated?) was Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood (was it the Booker?) When I used to read sci-fi in the 60s, a lot of great novels were Hugo and Nebula award winners. Since then, not so much.
(Actually, speaking of Atwood, wasn’t Oryx and Crake nominated too? That was good but not exceptional.)
April 26, 2010 at 12:26 am
Jen Brubacher
I’d like to say that some of the major worries people have about ebooks can be avoided by avoiding the Kindle. Unfortunately, since it has so much press in the US, it confuses people and makes them believe it’s the ONLY ebook reader available, or at least that what it offers is representative, but it’s not. It’s a paranoid and proprietary gadget when compared to others.
I have a Sony Reader (the smaller pocket edition.) Once a book is on it, they have no access and cannot delete it (I couldn’t believe that whole 1984 mess with Kindle!) I’m outside of the US & Canada so I don’t even buy from the Sony store and it works fine. I have the option of reading pdfs, epubs, lrfs, and a few more formats, and when I buy an ebook I choose which I prefer– usually epub, which is more accessible and avoids the DRM issue. I have two applications on my computer that can convert formats, too, so if I get a reader that won’t take a certain format there’s a good chance I can convert my library over (just like with old Wordperfect files.) I keep a copy of my ebook library on my computer and a usb drive so if my reader breaks down the books are still there.
Having this device has encouraged me to try out more small press books, some of which are very good. It has allowed me to read more by always having my library available. It can make the distance between writer and reader very small indeed. The publishing industry isn’t dying, it’s changing (again.) As a writer and a librarian I find the whole process fascinating.
April 26, 2010 at 10:48 pm
Graham Clements
Graham,
I loved Oryx and Crake, it was nominated for a booker. I am waiting for its sequel The Year of the Flood to come out in paperback in August (that’s in Australia). I will wait to buy it from my local bookstore even though it probably is available on Amazon. Her novel the Handmaid’s Tale won the 1986 Booker and also the Arthur C. Clarke Award.
April 27, 2010 at 1:07 am
Graham Storrs
Graham C, Yes, for a woman who denies that she writes sci-fi, she’s produced quite a lot, hasn’t she? (Is that just snobbery, or what?) Anyway, yes, I quite enjoyed The Handmaid’s Tale. Again, good but not exceptional. Shouldn’t award winning books be exceptional?
October 3, 2010 at 5:24 am
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